The McCone Files

by Marcia Muller

  Weeks before Andrea Shoemaker had begun to receive the notes from “John.” Unless the harassment had started earlier? No, I’d seen all the notes, examined their postmarks. Unless she’d thrown away the first ones, as she had the card that came with the funeral arrangement?

  “Shoemaker tell you why he wanted to find Carding?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And your investigation last April had nothing to do with Carding?”

  At first I thought Morrison hadn’t heard the question. He was looking out the window; then he turned, expression thoughtful, and opened one of the drawers of the filing cabinet beside him.”Let me refresh my memory,” he said, taking out a couple of folders. I watched as he flipped through them, frowning.

  Finally he said, “I’m not gonna ask about your case. If something feels wrong, it could be because of what I turned up last spring—and that I don’t want on my conscience.” He closed one file, slipped it back in the cabinet, then glanced at his watch. “Damn! I just remembered I’ve got to make a call.” He crossed to the desk, set the open file on it. “I better do it from the other room. You stay here, find something to read.”

  I waited until he’d left, then went over and picked up the file. Read it with growing interest and began putting things together. Andrea had been discreet about her extramarital activities, but not so discreet that a competent investigator like Morrison couldn’t uncover them.

  When Morrison returned, I was ready to leave for the Lost Coast.

  “Hope you weren’t bored,” he said.

  “No, I’m easily amused. And, Mr. Morrison, I owe you a dinner.”

  “You know where to find me. I’ll look forward to seeing you again.”

  And now that I’d reached the cabin, Andrea had disappeared. The victim of violence, all signs indicted. But the victim of whom? John Carding—a man no one had seen or heard from for over ten years? Another man named John, one of her cast-off lovers? Or…?

  What mattered now was to find her.

  I retraced my steps, turning up the hood of my sweater again as I went outside. Circled the cabin, peering through the lashing rain. I could make out a couple of other small structures back there: outhouse and shed. The outhouse was empty. I crossed to the shed. Its door was propped open with a log, as if she’d been getting fuel for the stove.

  Inside, next to a neatly stacked cord of wood, I found her.

  She lay face down on the hard-packed dirt floor, blue-jeaned legs splayed, plaid-jacketed arms flung above her head, chestnut hair cascading over her back. The little room was silent, the total silence that surrounds the dead. Even my own breath was stilled; when it came again, it sounded obscenely loud.

  I knelt beside her, forced myself to perform all the checks I’ve made more times than I could have imagined, no breath, no pulse, no warmth to the skin. And the rigidity…

  On the average—although there’s a wide variance—rigor mortis sets in to the upper body five to six hours after death; the whole body is usually affected within eighteen hours. I backed up and felt the lower portion of her body. Rigid; rigor was complete. I straightened, went to stand in the doorway. She’d probably been dead since midnight. And the cause? I couldn’t see any wounds, couldn’t further examine her without disturbing the scene. What I should be doing was getting in touch with the sheriff’s department.

  Back to the cabin. Emotions tore at me: anger, regret, and—yes—guilt that I hadn’t prevented this. But I also sensed that I couldn’t have prevented it. I, or someone like me, had been an integral component from the first.

  In the front room I found some kitchen matches and lit the oil lamp. Then I went around the table and looked down at where her revolver lay on the floor. More evidence; don’t touch it. The purse and its spilled contents rested near the edge of the stove. I inventoried the items visually: the usual makeup, brush, comb, spray perfume, wallet, keys, roll of postage stamps, daily planner that had flopped open to show pockets for business cards and receipts. And a loose piece of paper…

  Lucky Food Center, it said at the top. Perhaps she’d stopped to pick up supplies before leaving Eureka; the date and time on this receipt might indicate how long she’d remained in town before storming out on her husband and me. After I picked it up. At the bottom I found yesterday’s date and the time of purchase: 9:14 p.m.

  ‘KY SERV DELI…CRABS…WINE…DEL PRAD OLIVE…LG RED DEL…ROUGE ET NOIR..BAKERY…TANQ GIN—“

  A sound outside. Footsteps slogging through the mud. I stuffed the receipt into my pocket.

  Steve Shoemaker came through the open door in a hurry, rain hat pulled low on his forehead, droplets sluicing down his chiseled nose. He stopped when he saw me, looked around. “Where’s Andrea?”

  I said, “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know? Her Bronco’s outside. That’s her purse on the stove.”

  “And her weekend bag’s on the bed, but she’s nowhere to be found.”

  Shoemaker arranged his face into lines of concern. “There’s been a struggle here.”

  “Appears that way.”

  “Come on, we’ll go look for her. She may be in the outhouse or in the shed. She may be hurt—”

  “It won’t be necessary to look.” I had my gun out of my purse now, and I leveled it at him. “I know you killed your wife, Shoemaker.”

  “What!”

  “Her body’s where you left it last night. What time did you kill her? How?”

  His faked concern shaded into panic. “I didn’t—”

  “You did.”

  No reply. His eyes moved from side to side—calculating, looking for a way out.

  I added, “You drove her here in the Bronco, with your motorcycle inside. Arranged things to simulate a struggle, put her in the shed, then drove back to town on the bike. You shouldn’t have left the bike outside the house where I could see it. It wasn’t muddy out here last night, but it sure was dusty.”

  “Where are these baseless accusations coming from? John Carding—”

  “Is untraceable, probably dead, as you now from the check Dave Morrison ran.”

  “He told you—What about the notes, the flowers, the dead things—”

  “Sent by you.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “To set the scene for getting rid of a chronically unfaithful wife who had potential to become a political embarrassment.”

  He wasn’t cracking, though. “Granted, Andrea had her problems. But why would I rake up the Carding matter?”

  “Because it would sound convincing for you to admit what you did all those years ago. God knows it convinced me. And I doubt the police would ever have made the details public. Why destroy a grieving widower and prominent citizen? Particularly when they’d never find Carding or bring him to trial. You’ve got one problem though: me. You never should have brought me in to back up your scenario.”

  He licked his lips, glaring at me. Then he drew himself up, leaned forward aggressively—a posture the attorneys at All Souls jokingly refer to as their “litigator’s mode.”

  “You have no proof of this,” he said firmly, jabbing his index finger at me. “No proof whatsoever.”

  “Deli items, crabs, wine, apples,” I recited. “Del Prado Spanish olives, Tanqueray gin.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I have Andrea’s receipt for the items she bought at Lucky yesterday, before she stopped home to pick up her weekend bag. None of those things is here in the cabin.”

  “So?”

  “I know that at least two of them—the olives and the gin—are at your house in Eureka. I’m willing to bet they all are.”

  “What if they are? She did some shopping for me yesterday morning—”

  “The receipt is dated yesterday evening, nine-fourteen p.m. I’ll quote you, Shoemaker: ‘Apparently she went out to the coast last night. I haven’t seen her since she walked out on us that noon hour.’ But you claim you didn’t
leave home after noon.”

  That did it; that opened the cracks. He stood for a moment, then half collapsed into one of the chairs and put his head in his hands.

  The next summer, after I testified at the trial in which Steve Shoemaker was convicted of first-degree murder of his wife, I returned to the Lost Coast—with a backpack, without the .38, and in the company of my lover. We walked sand beaches under skies that showed infinite shadings of blue; we made love in fields of wildflowers; we waited quietly for the deer, falcons, and foxes.

  I’d already taken the bad from this place; now I could take the good.

  FILE CLOSED

  THE MOVERS had come for my office furniture. All that remained was for me to haul a few cartons to McCone Investigations’ nearly new van. I hefted one and carried it down to the foyer of All Souls’ big Victorian, then made three round trips for the others. Before I went downstairs for the last time I let my gaze wander around the front room that for years had been my home away from home. Empty, it looked battle-scarred and shabby: the wallpaper was peeling; the ceiling paint had blistered; the hardwood floors were scrapped; there were gouges in the mantel of the nonworking fireplace.

  A far cry from the new offices on the waterfront, I thought, but still I’d miss this room. Would miss sitting in my swivel chair in the window bay and contemplating the sagging rooflines of the Outer Mission district or the weedy triangular park below. Would miss pacing the faded Oriental carpet while talking on the phone. But most of all I would miss the familiar day-to-day sounds of the co-op that had assured me that I was among friends.

  Only in the end friends here had been damned few. Now none were left. Time to say goodbye. Time to move on the McCone Investigations’ new offices on one of the piers off the Embarcadero, next to the equally new offices of Altman & Zahn, Attorneys-at-Law.

  I took the last carton downstairs.

  Ted’s old desk still stood in the foyer, but without his personal possessions—particularly the coffee mug shaped like Gertrude Stein’s head and the campy lamp fashioned from a nest-stockinged mannequin’s leg—it was a slate wiped clean of the years he had presided there. Already he’d be arranging those treasures down at the pier. I set the box with the others and, both out of curiosity and nostalgia, went along the hall to the converted closet under the stairs that had been my first office.

  Rae Kelleher, its recent occupant, had already taken her belongings to McCone Investigations. With relief I saw she’d left the ratty old armchair. For a moment I stood in the door looking at each familiar crack in the walls; then I stepped inside and ran my hand over the chairs back where stuffing sprouted. How many hours had I sat there, honing my fledgling investigator’s skills?

  A cardboard box tucked under the angle of the staircase caught my eye. I peered at it wondering why Rae had left it behind, and saw lettering in her hand: “McCone Files.” Early ones, they must be. I’d probably neglected to remove them from the cabinet when I transferred my things upstairs. I pulled the box toward me, sat down in the armchair, and lifted the lid. A dry, dusty odor wafted up. On the files’ tabs I saw names: Albritton, DiCesare, Kaufmann, Morrison, Smith, Snelling, Whelan, and many more. Some I recognized immediately, others were only vaguely familiar, and about the rest I hadn’t a clue. I scanned them, remembering—

  Morrison! That damned case! It was the only file I hadn’t been able to close in all my years at All Souls.

  I pulled it from the box and flipped through. Interesting case. Marnie Morrison, the naïve young woman with Daddy’s American Express card. Jon Howard, the “financier” who had used her to help him scam half the merchants in San Francisco. And Hank in turn had used the case’s promise to lure me into taking the job here.

  But I hadn’t been able to solve it.

  Could I solve it now?

  Well, maybe. I was a far better investigator than when I’d operated out of this tiny office. The hundreds of hours spent honing my skills had paid off; so had my life experiences, good and bad. I picked up on the facts that I might not have noticed back then, could interpret them more easily, had learned to trust my gut-level instincts, no matter how far-fetched they might seem.

  I turned my attention to the file.

  Well, there was one thing right off—the daily phone calls Jon Howard had made to the car dealership in Walnut Creek. When I’d driven out there and talked with its manager, neither he nor his salesman could remember the memorable young couple.

  I took a pen form my purse, made a note of the dealership’s name, address, and phone number, then read on.

  And there was something else—the conversation I’d had with the salesman at European Motors here in the city. My recent experience with buying a “pre-owned” van for the agency put a new light on his comments.

  My office phone had been disconnected the day before, and the remaining partners would frown on me placing toll calls on All Souls’ line. Quickly I hauled the file box out to where my other cartons sat, threw on my jacket, and headed downhill to the Remedy Lounge on Mission Street.

  The Remedy had long been a favorite watering hole for the old-timers at All Souls. Brian, the owner, extended us all sorts of courtesies—excluding table service for anyone but Rae, who reminded him of his dead sister, and including running tabs and letting us use his office phone. When I got there the place was empty and the big Irishman was watching his favorite soap opera on the TV mounted above the bar.

  “Sure,” he said in answer to my request, “use the phone all you want. Yours is turned off already?”

  “Right. It’s moving day.”

  Brian’s fleshy face grew melancholy. He picked up a rag and began wiping down the already polished surface of the bar. “Guess I won’t be seeing much of you guys anymore.”

  “Why not? The bar’s on a direct line between the new offices and the Safeway where we all shop.”

  He shrugged. “People always say stuff like that, but in the end they drift away.”

  “We’ll prove you wrong,” I told him, even thought I suspected he was right. “We’ll see.” He pressed the button that unlocked the door to his office.

  At his desk I opened my notebook and dialed the number of Ben Rudolph Chevrolet in Walnut Creek. I reached their used-car department. The salesman’s answer to my first question confirmed what I already suspected. His supervisor, who had worked there since the late seventies, was out to lunch, he told me, but would be back around two.

  Five minutes later I was in the van and on my way to the East Bay.

  Walnut Creek is a suburb of San Francisco, but a city in its own right, sprawling in a broad valley in the shadow of Mount Diablo. When I’d traveled there on the Morrison case more than a decade earlier, it still had a small-town flavor: few trendy shops and restaurants in the downtown district; only one office building over two stories; tracts and shopping centers, yes, but also, semi-rural neighborhoods where the residents still kept horses and chickens. Now it was a hub of commerce, with tall buildings whose tinted and smoked glass glowed in the afternoon sun. There was a new cultural center, a restaurant on nearly every corner, and the tracts went on forever.

  Ben Rudolph Chevrolet occupied the same location on North Main Street, although its neighbors squeezed more tightly against it. As I parked in the customer lot I wondered why years ago I had neglected to call the phone number the SFPD had supplied me. If I’d phoned ahead rather than just driven out here, I’d have discovered that the dealership maintained separate lines for its new- and used-car departments. And I’d have known that Jon Howard’s daily calls weren’t made because he was hot on the trail of a snappy new Corvette.

  I went directly to the manager of the used-car department, a ruddy-faced, prosperous-looking man named Dave Swenson. Yes, he confirmed, he’d worked there since seventy-eight. “Only way to survive in this business is to stick with one dealership, dig in, create your own clientele.”

  “I’m looking for someone who might’ve been a salesperson here in the late seve
nties and early eighties.” I showed him my I.D. “Handsome man, dark hair and mustache, late twenties. Good build. Below average height. His name may have been Jon Howard.”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I know the fella you’re talking about, but got it backwards. His first name was Howard John.”

  Howard John—simple transposition. The salesman at European Motors had told me he knew enough about used cars to sell them, and he’d been correct. “John’s not working here anymore?”

  “Hell, no. He was fired over a dozen years ago. I don’t recall exactly when.” Swenson tapped his temple. “Sorry, the old memory’s going.”

  “But you remembered him right off.”

  “Well, he was that kind of guy. A real screw-up, always talking big and never doing anything about it, but you couldn’t help but like him.”

  “Talking big, how?”

  “Ah, the usual. He was studying nights, gonna get his MBA, set up some financial company, be somebody. He’d have a big house in the city, a limo, boats and planes, hobnob with all the right people—you know. All smoke and no fire, Howie was, you had to hand it to him, he could be an entertaining fellow.”

  “And then he was fired.”

  “Yeah. It was stupid, it didn’t have to happen. The guy was producing; he made sales when nobody else could. What Howie did, he took a vacation to Mammouth to ski. When his week was up, he started calling in, saying he as sick with some bug he caught down there. This went on for weeks, and the boss got suspicious, so he checked out Howie’s apartment. The manager said he hadn’t been back since he drove off with his ski gear the month before. So a few days after that when Howie strolled in here all innocent and business-as-usual, the boss had no choice but to can him.”

  “What happened to him? Do you know where he’s working now?”

  Swenson stared thoughtfully at me. “You know, I meant it when I said I liked the guy.”

  “I don’t mean him any harm, Mr. Swenson.”

  “No?” He waited.