The McCone Files

by Marcia Muller

  He slipped it into mine—long-fingered. Quickly we went through the door, crossed the porch, jumped to the ground. The radio continued to play forlornly behind us. I glanced briefly at Dan, couldn’t make out much more than a tall, slender build and a thatch of pale hair. His face turned from me, toward the cottage.

  “Jesus,” he said in an awed voice.

  I tugged urgently at his hand. “There’s no telling how long those apartment buildings are going to stand.”

  He turned, looked up at them, said “Jesus” again. I urged him toward the mound of debris.

  This time I opted for speed rather than caution—a mistake, because as we neared the top, a cracking noise came from high above. I gave Dan a push, slid after him. A dark, jagged object hurtled down, missing us only by inches. More plaster board—deadly at that velocity.

  For a moment I sat straddle-legged on the ground, sucking in my breath, releasing it tremulously, gasping for more air. Then hands pulled me to my feet and dragged me across the yard toward the sidewalk—Mel and Dan.

  Night had fallen by now. A fire had broken out in the house across the street. Its red-orange flickering showed the man I’d just rescued; ordinary-looking, with regular features that were now marred by dirt and a long cut on the forehead, from which blood had trickled and dried. His pale eyes were studying me; suddenly he looked abashed and shoved both hands into his jeans pocket.

  After a moment he asked, “How did you find me?”

  “I put together some of the things you’d said on the phone. Doesn’t matter now.”

  “Why did you even bother?”

  “Because I care.”

  He looked at the ground.

  I added, “There never was any assault rifle, was there?”

  He shook his head.

  “You made it up, so someone would pay attention.”

  “…Yeah.”

  I felt anger welling up—irrational, considering the present circumstances, but nonetheless justified, “You didn’t have to frighten the people at the hotline. All you had to do was ask them for help. Or ask friends like Mel. He cares. People do, you know.”

  “Nobody does.”

  “Enough of that! All you have to do is look around to see how much people care about each other. Look at your friend here.” I gestured at Mel, who was standing a couple of feet away, staring at us. “He hurt his arm rescuing an old lady from his apartment house. Look at those people over by the burning house—they’re doing everything they can to help the firefighters. All over this city people are doing things for one another. Goddamn it, I’d never laid eyes on you, but I risked my life anyway!”

  Dan was silent for a moment. Finally he looked up at me. “I know you did. What can I do in return?”

  “For me? Nothing. Just pass it on to someone else.”

  Dan stared across the street at the flaming building, looked back into the shadows where this cottage lay in ruins. The he nodded and squared his shoulders. To Mel he said, “Let’s go over there, see if there’s anything we can do.”

  He put his arm around my shoulders and hugged me briefly, then he and Mel set off at a trot.

  The city is recovering now, as it did in 1906, and as it doubtless will when the next big quake hits. Resiliency is what disaster teaches us, I guess—along with the preciousness of life, no matter how disappointing or burdensome it may often seem.

  Dan’s recovering, too: he’s only called the hotline twice, once for a referral to a therapist, and once to ask for my home number so he could invite me to dinner. I turned the invitation down, because neither of us needs to dwell on the trauma of October seventeenth, and I was fairly sure I heard a measure of relief in his voice when I did so.

  I’ll never forget Dan, though—or where I was when. And the strains of Beethoven’s Third Symphony will forever remind me of the day after which things would never be the same again.

  FINAL RESTING PLACE

  THE VOICES of the well-dressed lunch crowd reverberated off the chromium and Formica of Max’s Diner. Busy waiters made their way through the room, trays laden with meatloaf, mashed potatoes with gravy, and hot turkey sandwiches. The booths and tables and counter seats of the trendy restaurant—one of the forerunners of San Francisco’s fifties revival—were all taken, and a sizable crowd awaited their turn in the bar. What I waited for was Max’s famous onion rings, along with the basket of sliders—little burgers—I’d just ordered.

  I was seated in one of the window booths overlooking Third Street with Diana Richards, an old friend from college. Back in the seventies, Diana and I had shared a dilapidated old house a few blocks from the U.C. Berkeley campus with a fluctuating group of anywhere from five to ten other semi-indigent students, but nowadays we didn’t see much of each other. We had followed very different paths since graduation she’d become a media buyer for the city’s top ad agency, drove a new Mercedes, and lived graciously in one of the new condominium complexes near the financial district; I’d become a private investigator with a law cooperative, drove a beat-up MG, and lived chaotically in an old cottage that was constantly in the throes of renovation. I still liked Diana, though—enough that when she’d called that morning and asked to meet with me to discuss a problem, I’d dropped everything and driven downtown to Max’s.

  Milkshakes—the genuine article—arrived. I poured a generous dollop into my glass from the metal shaker. Diana just sat there, staring out at the passersby on the sidewalk. We’d exchanged the usual small talk while waiting for a table and scanning the menu (“Have you heard from any of the old gang?” “Do you still like your job?” “Any interesting men in your life?”), but then she’d grown uncharacteristically silent. Now I sipped and waited for her to speak.

  After a moment she sighed and turned her yellow eyes toward me. I’ve never know anyone with eyes so much like a cat’s; their color always startles me when we meet to renew our friendship. And they are her best feature, lending her heart-shaped face and exotic aura and perfectly complementing her wavy brown hair.

  She said, “As I told you on the phone, Sharon, I have a problem.”

  “Not serious so much as…nagging.”

  “I see. Are you consulting me on a personal or professional basis?”

  “Professional, if you can take on something for someone who’s not an All Souls client.” All Souls is the legal cooperative where I work; our clients purchase memberships, much as they would in a health plan, and pay fees that are scaled to their incomes.

  “Then you actually want to hire me?”

  “I’d pay whatever the going rate is.”

  I considered. At the moment my regular caseload was exceptionally light. And I could certainly use some extra money; I was in the middle of a home-repair crisis that threatened to drain my checking account long before payday. “I think I can fit it in. Why don’t you tell me about the problem.”

  Diana waited while our food was delivered, than began: “Did you know that my mother died two months ago?”

  “No, I didn’t. I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks. Mom died in Cabo San Lucas, at a second home she and my father have down there. Dad had the cause of death hushed up; she’d been drinking a lot and passed out and drowned in the hot tub.”

  “God.”

  “Yes.” Diana’s mouth pulled down grimly. “It was a horrible way to go. And so unlike my mother. Dad naturally wanted to keep it from getting into the papers, so it wouldn’t damage his precious reputation.”

  The bitterness and thinly veiled anger in her voice brought me a vivid memory of Carl Richards: a severe, controlling man, chief executive with a major insurance company. When we’d been in college, he and his wife, Teresa, had crossed the Bay Bridge from San Francisco once a month to take Diana and a few of her friends to dinner. The evenings were not great successes; the restaurants the Richards’ chose were too elegant for our preferred jeans and t-shirts, the conversations stilted to the point of strangulation. Carl Richards made no pretense of liking any
of us; he used the dinners as a forum for airing his disapproval of the liberal political climate at Berkeley, and boasted that he had refused to pay more than Diana’s basic expenses because she’d insisted on enrolling there. Teresa Richards tried hard, but her ineffectual social fluttering reminded me of a bird trapped in a confined space. Her husband often mocked what she said, and it was obvious she was completely dominated by him. Even with the nonwisdom of nineteen, I sensed they were a couple who had grown apart, as the man made his way in the world and the woman tended the home fires.

  Diana plucked a piece of fried chicken from the basket in front of her, eyed it with distaste, then put it back. I reached for an onion ring.

  “Do you know what the San Francisco Memorial Columbarium is?” she asked.

  I nodded. The Columbarium was the old Odd Fellows mausoleum for cremated remains, in the Inner Richmond district. Several years ago it had been bought and restored by the Neptune Society—a sort of All Souls of the funeral industry, specializing in low-cost cremations and interments, as well as burials at sea.

  “Well, Mom’s ashes are interred there, in a niche on the second floor. Once a week, on Tuesday, I have to consult with a major client in South San Francisco, and on the way back I stop in over the noon hour and…visit. I always take flowers—carnations, they were her favorite. There’s a little vase like thing attached to the wall next to the niche where you can put them. There were never any other flowers in it until three weeks ago. But then the carnations, always white ones with a dusting of red, started to appear.”

  I finished the onion ring and started in on the little hamburgers. When she didn’t go on, I said, “Maybe your father left them.”

  “That’s what I thought. It pleased me, because it meant he missed her and had belatedly come to appreciate her. But I had my monthly dinner with him last weekend.” She paused, her mouth twisting ruefully, “Old habits die hard, I suppose I do it to keep up the illusion we’re a family. Anyway, at dinner I mentioned how glad I was he’d taken to visiting the Columbarium, and he said he hadn’t been back there since the interment.”

  The man certainly didn’t trouble with sentiment, I thought. “Well, what about another relative? Or a friend?”

  “None of our relatives live in the area, and I don’t know of any close friend Mom might have had. Social friends, yes. The wives of other executives at Dad’s company, the neighbors on Russian Hill, the ladies she played bridge with at her club. But no one who would have cared enough to leave flowers.”

  “So you want me to find out who is leaving them.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because since they’ve started appearing it’s occurred to me that I never really knew my mother. I loved her, but in my own way I dismissed her almost as much as my father did. If Mom had that good a friend, I want to talk with her. I want to see my mother through the eyes of someone who did know her. Can you understand that?”

  “Yes, I can,” I said, thinking of my own mother. I would never dismiss Ma—wouldn’t dare dismiss the hundred-and-five pound dynamo who warms and energizes the McCone homestead in San Diego—but at the same time I didn’t really know much about her life, except as it related to Pa and us kids.

  “What about the staff at the Columbarium?” I asked. “Could they tell you anything?”

  “The staff occupy a separate building. There’s hardly ever anyone in the mausoleum, except for occasional visitors, or when they hold a memorial service.”

  “And you’ve always gone on Tuesday at noon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are the flowers you find there fresh?”

  “Yes. And that means they’d have to be left that morning, since the Columbarium’s not open to visitors on Monday.”

  “Then it means this friend goes there before noon on Tuesdays.”

  “Why don’t you spend a Tuesday morning there and wait for her?”

  “As I said, I have regular meetings with a major client then. Besides, I’d feel strange, just approaching her and asking to talk about Mom. It would be better if I knew something about her first. That’s why I thought of you. You could follow her, find out where she lives and something about her. Knowing a few details would make it easier for me.”

  I thought for a moment. It was an odd request, something she really didn’t need a professional investigator for, and not at all the kind of job I’d normally take on. But Diana was a friend, so for old times’ sake…

  “Okay,” I finally said. “Today’s Monday. I’ll go to the Columbarium at nine tomorrow morning and check it out.”

  Tuesday dawned gray, with a slowly drifting fog that provided a perfect backdrop for a visit to the dead. Foghorns moaned a lament as I walked along Loraine Court, a single block of pleasant stucco homes that dead ended at the gates of the park surrounding the Columbarium. The massive neoclassical building loomed ahead of me, a poignant reminder of the days when the Richmond district was mostly sand dunes stretching toward the sea, when San Franciscans were still laid to rest in the city’s soil. That was before greed gripped the real-estate market in the early decades of the century, and developers decided the limited acreage was too valuable to be wasted on cemeteries. First cremation was outlawed within the city, then burials, and by the late 1930s the last bodies were moved south to the necropolis of Colma. Only Columbarium remained, protected from destruction by the Homestead Act.

  When I’d first moved to the city I’d often wondered about the verdigrised copper dome that could be glimpsed when driving along Geary Boulevard, and once I’d detoured to investigate the structure it topped. What I’d found was a decaying rotunda with four small wings jutting off. Cracks and water stains marred its façade; weeds grew high around it; one stained-glass window had buckled with age. The neglect it had suffered since the Odd Fellows had sold it to an absentee owner some forty years before had taken its full toll.

  But now I saw the building sported a fresh coat of paint: a medley of lavender, beige, and subdued green highlighted its ornate architectural details. The lawn was clipped, the surrounding fir trees pruned, the names and dates on the exterior niches newly lettered and easily readable. The dome still had a green patina, but somehow it seemed more appropriate than shiny copper.

  As I followed the graveled path toward the entrance, I began to feel as if I were suspended in a shadow world between the past and the present. A block away Geary was clogged with cars and trucks and buses, but here their sounds were muted. When I looked to my left I could see the side wall of the Coronet Theater, splattered with garish, chaotic colors and harmonious composition of a stained-glass window. The modern-day city seemed to recede, leaving me not unhappily marooned on this small island in time.

  The great iron doors to the building stood open, inviting visitors. I crossed a small entry and stepped into the rotunda itself. Tapestry-cushioned straight chairs were arranged in rows there, and large floral offerings stood next to a lectern probably for a memorial service. I glanced briefly at them and then allowed my attention to be drawn upward, toward the magnificent round stained-glass window at the top of the dome. All around me soft, prismatic light fell from it and the other windows.

  The second and third floors of the building were galleries—circular mezzanines below the dome. The interior was fully as ornate as the exterior and also freshly painted, in restful blues and white and tans and gilt that highlighted the bas-relief flowers and birds and medallions. As I turned and walked toward an enclosed staircase to my left, my heels clicked on the mosaic marble floor; the sound echoed all around me. Otherwise the rotunda was hushed and chill as near as I could tell, I was the only person there.

  Diana had told me I would find her mother’s niche on the second floor, in the wing called Kepheus—named, as the others were, after one of the four Greek winds. I climbed the curving staircase and began moving along the gallery. The view of the rotunda floor was dizzying from this height; the wall opposite the arches was honeycombed with nic
hes. Some of them were covered with plaques engraved with people’s names and dates of birth and death; others were glass-fronted and afforded a view of the funerary urns. Still others were vacant, a number marked with red tags—meaning, I assumed, that the niche had been sold.

  I found the name Kepheus in sculpted relief above an archway several yards from the entrance to the staircase. Inside was a smallish room—no more than twelve by sixteen feet—containing perhaps a hundred niches. At its front were two marble pillars and steps leading up to a large niche containing a coffin-shaped box; the ones on the walls to either side of it were backed with stained-glass windows. Most of the other niches were smaller and contained urns of all types—gold, silver, brass, ceramics. Quickly I located Teresa Richards’: at eye level near the entry, containing a simple jar of hand thrown blue pottery. There were no flowers in the metal holder attached to it.

  Now what? I thought, shivering from the sharp chill and glancing around the room. The reason for the cold was evident: art on the leaded-glass skylight was missing. Water stains were prominent on the vaulted ceiling and walls; the pillars were chipped and cracked. Diana had mentioned that the restoration work was being done piecemeal, because the Neptune Society—a profit making organization—was not eligible for funding usually available to those undertaking projects of historical significance. While I could appreciate the necessity of starting on the ground floor and working upward, I wasn’t sure I would want my final resting place to be in a structure that—up here, at least—reminded me of Dracula’s castle.

  And then I thought, just listen to yourself. It isn’t as if you’d be peering through the glass of your niche at your surroundings! And just think of being here with all the great San Franciscans—Adolph Sutro, A. P. Hotaling, the Stanfords and Folgers and Magnins. Of course, it isn’t as if you’d be creeping out of your niche at night to hold long, fascinating conversations with them, either…