There's Nothing to Be Afraid Of

by Marcia Muller

  I was about to explain my interest in the hotel when the driver of the truck jumped down from the cab and began hollering at a group of workers who were idling nearby. I glanced over there and said, “Could we find someplace quieter to talk?”

  “Certainly. Let’s go down by the jetty.” Taking my arm again, as if he were afraid I might trip on uneven ground, LaFond led me across the site to the bay shore, where a wall of natural rock rose above the water. I smiled faintly, remembering his concern about his insurance rates. He didn’t let go of me until I was firmly ensconced on the jetty, then stepped back and stood before me, feet placed wide, arms folded across his chest.

  “I take it the brokers sent you,” he said.

  “No, I’m a private investigator.”

  Concern flared in his eyes. “What’s wrong over there?”

  “There have been problems—”

  “Who hired you?”

  “The tenants. They—”

  “There’s plenty of heat and hot water. I’ve complied with every ordinance. And I haven’t tried to raise their rents.”

  “I know that. But there have been—”

  “They have nothing to complain about. I try to be a fair landlord.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  Agitated, LaFond began to pace. “God knows I never wanted to own that fleabag. If it hadn’t been a contingency on the deal for this land, I wouldn’t have touched it. I don’t know a damned thing about being a landlord to a bunch of slum dwellers. And I can’t sell the dump; no one will even look at it, much less make an offer. And now, what is it? Have they gotten up a petition or what?”

  “Mr. LaFond—”

  “I can’t let them on that roof. They don’t understand the insurance—”

  “Mr. LaFond!” I raised my voice, as Carolyn had earlier with Mary Zemanek. “No one wants anything from you.”

  The words halted his pacing. “They don’t?”

  “No. Why don’t you sit down and I’ll explain.”

  He hesitated, then came over and leaned against the jetty next to me. “Explain, then.”

  “There have been problems at the hotel. Someone seems to be trying to frighten your tenants.”

  “Oh, that. Mary Zemanek mentioned something about it. But it was my impression that it was more hysteria than anything else.”

  “Perhaps. But the Refugee Assistance Center—which settled many of the Asian tenants in the hotel—is concerned enough to want me to look into it.”

  “They’re paying you?”

  “Yes.”

  “So none of this will come out of my pocket?”

  “No.

  “I see.” He paused, obviously pleased with that. “But why have you come to me?”

  “I want to get your ideas on who might be causing these incidents.”

  “My ideas. Why should I have any?”

  “Well, it is your building.”

  “I own it, yes. But I haven’t even set foot in it since last August. I have a manager to oversee it; don’t tell me Mary’s been falling down on the job.”

  “I’m sure she’s doing the best she can. But these incidents apparently are quite frightening.”

  “She didn’t describe them that way.”

  “Probably she didn’t want to alarm you. But they recur . . . Today for instance, someone destroyed a Christmas tree that was in the lobby.”

  An odd look passed over LaFond’s face, and then he frowned. “I can see how that could happen. That whole neighborhood’s frightening. If you ask me, it’s got to be some weirdo off the street who gets his kicks out of terrorizing people.”

  “Did you ever consider that it might be someone with an ulterior motive?”

  He squinted at me through the sunlight. “What kind of motive?”

  I shrugged, letting it go temporarily. “Mr. LaFond, what do you intend to do with the hotel?”

  “Sell it, if I can. It’s listed. But, as I said, there haven’t been any takers.”

  “A sale would involve the buyer taking the tenants along with the building, wouldn’t it?”

  “That’s the way the rent control ordinance reads.”

  “And the new owner wouldn’t be able to raise the rents.”

  “No. It’s a real drawback to a sale. Anyone financing that building today, given what interest rates are, would be taking on a heavy debt load. And, of course, there are repairs and maintenance. The building doesn’t pay for itself now, let alone with higher financing.” He pushed away from the wall and began to pace again. “I’d love to unload it, or turn it into something more profitable.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, there’s nothing I can do, given the neighborhood. If it were a few blocks north, it would be a good possibility for one of those bed-and-breakfast places, or a chic, small hotel. You know the Abigail—near the main library?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, something like that. Spruce it up, furnish it with nice Victorian antiques, stick in a lounge, maybe a little restaurant. You’d have a real money-maker. I had a prospective buyer who was considering just that sort of thing—until he took a good look at the neighborhood.”

  “So effectively you’re stuck with the Globe—and its tenants.”

  “Yes.” He stopped pacing and turned to look at me, openly dismayed. “I guess I am.”

  “Have you ever thought of getting the tenants out? It would make the property more saleable.”

  “Of course I’ve thought of it. But there’s no legal way to do that.”

  “But if they were frightened into leaving . . .”

  His eyes narrowed. “What you’re saying is that I’m the one who is frightening them, to get them to vacate the premises.”

  I just watched him, expecting an outburst of anger.

  Roy LaFond surprised me. He ran a hand through his thick white hair, obviously at a loss for words. He surprised me so much, in fact, that I couldn’t think of anything to say either. I was fairly certain LaFond hadn’t gotten where he was by being a nice guy, and I’d taken his boyishness for an act, much like Otis Knox’s “aw, shucks, honey” performance. But LaFond actually seemed puzzled—then hurt.

  We looked at each other for a minute, and then he said with wounded dignity. “I assure you, Ms. McCone, I do not sneak around that hotel growling at children in the stairwell. Nor do I create power failures, make noises in the basement, or destroy Christmas trees. I may not want that building or its tenants, but it’s in my best interests to make sure they are safe and secure.”

  I had started to feel slightly ashamed, but when he said that about his best interests, the emotion evaporated. I said, “And you have no ideas about who might be responsible for these incidents?”

  “No, none at all. And now I have to get back to my engineer.” He held out his arm, so he could guide me back to my car and thus avoid a potential lawsuit. When we got there, I thanked him for his time and told him I’d let him know what I found out. He merely nodded perfunctorily and walked away.

  I thought about Roy LaFond and his odd reaction all the way to the city. And I particularly thought about his protestation of not growling at children in the stairwell or creating power failures; initially he’d hardly seemed aware of the incidents. It would be interesting to know how much Mary Zemanek had told him. And it would also be interesting to know where Roy LaFond had been about the time that Christmas had been dismembered.

  CHAPTER SIX

  By the time I got back to the city it was close to five o’clock; there would be just enough time to go to my office at All Souls Legal Cooperative in Bernal Heights and make a few phone calls before meeting Don at my house for dinner. Since I didn’t intend to be there long, I left my car in the driveway of the brown Victorian and hurried up the front steps.

  Ted, the secretary, was typing industriously when I came through the door, and he nodded at me, barely taking his eyes of the handwritten notes he was transcribing. There was no sign of his usual New York Times cros
sword puzzle—or his friendly grin. A familiar flat feeling stole over me as I went down the hall and dumped my coat and bag in my office.

  To banish the feeling, I continued along the narrow corridor to my boss, Hank Zahn’s office. But the door was shut and a Do Not Disturb sign—courtesy of the Doubletree Inn in Monterey—hung on the knob. I looked at it, debated knocking anyway, then went all the way to the rear of the house to the big country kitchen. No one was there, and none of the usual unwashed coffee cups and dishes cluttered the counters. The flat feeling was fast becoming a depression.

  I went over to the refrigerator and looked in. A couple of bottles of Calistoga Water, some limp celery, condiments and a withered lime. No wine, no big pots of Hank’s famous beef stew, not even the alfalfa sprouts the co-op’s health food addicts favored. I shut the fridge door and leaned against it, sighing.

  For several months now there had been a change in the atmosphere at All Souls. Once warm, friendly, and easygoing, it was cold and tense. People no longer took their meals here or organized impromptu parties; several of the attorneys had moved out of the living quarters on the second floor. There were conferences behind closed doors, and I was always running across people in furtive discussions in odd places like the service porch.

  I had my suspicions about what was wrong and I would have liked to talk them over with someone. But Hank, my best friend there, seemed to be hiding from everyone—me included. My other good friend, Anne-Marie Altmann, the co-op’s tax attorney, was one of those who had moved out, so I saw less of here than before, and when I did we kept off the subject of work.

  I started back to my office, considered giving Anne-Marie a call, but decided against it. She had been with All Souls since before I was hired and, as a full partner, was in a position to know what was going on. But she also kept very much to herself—it had taken me years to get to know her, and then only because we’d discovered a common passion for late-night horror movies. If Anne-Marie hadn’t seen fit to discuss the matter with me so far, she either didn’t know very much or didn’t want to talk about it. I’d just have to wait until Hank came out of his self-imposed isolation, or until there was some sort of formal explanation.

  I went into my office and checked my in box for messages. There were two, one from the contractor who was remodeling my bathroom at my house, the other from Don. I tried my home number and got a busy signal; what was the workman doing on the phone when he was supposed to be hooking up the shower? Breaking the connection, I reached for my Rolodex and looked up the number for the police department’s Gang Task Force. I dialed, but my contact there, Inspector Richard Loo, was off duty. I left a message asking him to call me in the morning.

  Next I called the San Francisco Chronicle and asked for a reporter I knew, J.D. Smith. J.D. was also gone for the day. I said to the man who answered, “Maybe you can help me. I’m trying to find out who wrote the interview you published a few months ago with Otis Knox.”

  “I think that was Jeff Ellis.”

  “Is he there?”

  “Nope. He’s gone too.”

  Another message for either J.D. or Jeff Ellis to call me when convenient.

  Next I dialed Carolyn Bui. She was in her office. I gave her a brief rundown on what I’d been doing all day, and we agreed to meet at the Globe Hotel at ten-thirty.

  Finally I called Don at KSUN. At least I could be assured of his being available; he was on the air until six. But as it was, he couldn’t take the call right away because he was reading a couple of commercials. I turned up the transistor radio I keep in the office and listened to him. According to Don’s enthusiastic voice, your life wouldn’t be complete until you’d checked out the new selection of records and tapes at the Record Factory. And all those kids out in San Ramon had better make it to the KSUN-sponsored Christmas extravaganza at the Civic Auditorium next Friday night. Don knew it would be terrific, because he’d be there personally to give our free KSUN T-shirts to the first fifty couples . . .

  Then he made some strange honking noises, told a terrible joke, laughed uproariously, and put a record on.

  “Hi, babe,” his voice said at the other end of the line.

  I turned the radio off. “I swear sometimes I wonder what I’m doing with you.”

  “Ah, you were listening to the show.”

  “Briefly. I’m glad I know the real you.” The real Don was a quiet man, a classical pianist who hated the mediocre rock-and-roll that was the core of KSUN’s format.

  “Me, too. Are we on for dinner?”

  “Yes, but I’ll have to pick something up.” We discussed what we wanted to have, settled on my special burgers with lots of cheese, and said we’d meet at my house after six. Whoever arrived first would open the wine. After I hung up, I tried to call my contractor again, but the line was still busy.

  That bothered me a little. The contractor was a diminutive Australian name Barry who claimed to be very good with plumbing. As far as I was concerned, his primary virtue was that he worked cheap. Up to now he had spent a great deal of time puttering around the bathroom mumbling strange things that I took to be the way they expressed frustration in Australia. It had taken a week for Barry to install the toilet—which had previously been located in an icy cubicle on the back porch—and the principles of hot and cold water pipes still eluded him. As a result, I’d been taking my showers either at the converted warehouse loft where Don lived or at the next-door neighbors’.

  Well, I decided. I’d know what the trouble was soon enough. No use rushing home before I did the grocery shopping.

  When I left the office I noticed Ted was gone, his typewriter neatly covered. The hallway was dark, the Do Not Disturb sing still hung on Hank’s door, and no convivial noises or cooking smells emanated from the kitchen. In the old days, Ted would still have been there, gabbing with the attorneys as they emerged from their offices or returned from a day in court. Hank would have been throwing together one of his wonderful concoctions for dinner and taking a lot of ribbing about incipient indigestion. I probably would have been persuaded to stay around for a glass of wine—or two or three. But now all was hushed and gloomy. I wondered if anyone would even think to put up the traditional Christmas tree in the front window this year.

  Brooding over this state of affairs, I went out and found a note on my car’s windshield. It read: “Sharon—Please do not park in the driveway. It is for the convenience of the attorneys only.” And it was signed by Gilbert Thayer, a University of Michigan graduate who had joined the co-op last year—and whom I considered to be a large part of the current problem. I crumpled the note and dropped it on the ground where I hoped he would find it, then drove to the nearby Safeway on Mission Street. After ten minutes of picking out my groceries and thirty-five standing in line, I was on my way home to check on my contractor’s latest disaster.

  Home was a brown-shingled cottage on Church Street, beyond where the J-line streetcar tracks stop. It was a quiet neighborhood, peopled mainly with blue-collar workers and a sprinkling of young professionals who had bought run-down houses and were fixing them up. In the ten months I’d lived there, I’d found that casual conversations over the back fence could be highly instructive; I had learned of a good place to buy linoleum from the Halls, who lived on the left side, and had been referred to Barry by the Curleys on the right. The Curleys were the ones who now let me use their shower—no doubt out of a sense of guilt.

  Both sides of the narrow street were lined with cards, parked bumper to bumper, and Don’s antique gold Jaguar was in my driveway. I pulled in parallel, blocking him, and looked around for Barry’s truck. It wasn’t in sight—a sign I wasn’t sure how to interpret. I grabbed the grocery bag, hurried up the front steps, and stood on the porch, fumbling with my keys. Once inside, I tripped over my cat, Watney, who ran to greet me; I went back toward the kitchen, scolding him. Don was at the table, drinking red wine and reading the evening paper.

  Don is big man, stocky, with a graceful bearing tha
t one normally doesn’t expect in someone his size. When I came in he stood up, his mouth curving beneath his shaggy black mustache, and planted a kiss on my cheek. I put the grocery bag down on the counter and said, “Okay, where is he?”

  “What a greeting.” Don went back to the table and poured me a glass of wine.

  Warily I took it from his outstretched hand. “If you’re giving me this before I’ve taken off my coat, it means trouble. Barry tried to reach me at work, but when I called back the line was busy. I take it you saw him.”

  “Yes. He’ll be back.”

  I glanced suspiciously at the hallway between the kitchen and the back porch. The bathroom opened off it, and I could see a shaft of light shining through the door. “Back from where?”

  “Why don’t you sit down and relax.”

  “Uh-oh.” But I took off my coat and sat, propping my feet on one of the other chairs. “All right, where did he go?”

  Don was beginning to smile again. “To borrow some surgical tools.”

  I didn’t know what I’d been expecting, but that definitely wasn’t it. “What on earth does he need surgical tools for?”

  “Well, as he explained it, he spilled a box of nails, and the bloody things ran down the bloody shower drain like a wombat into a burrow.”

  I smiled faintly. “So there are nails down the shower drain. That still doesn’t explain the need for surgical tools.”

  “Barry can’t reach the nails with any of his own implements, and they’re blocking the drain. So he spent the afternoon calling around and finally located an intern friend who would loan him—”

  “Oh, Lord! He’s going to fish the nails out of the drain with the instruments this doctor operates with?”

  “Well, I gather he’s only an intern. They probably haven’t seen much service.”

  “Oh, Lord! Remind me to get his name and never to go to him if I have to be under the knife.”

  Don and I looked at each other, and then we both started to laugh. It quickly turned into one of our shared fits, where we got started and couldn’t stop until we were red-faced, teary-eyed, and weak around our midsections. As luck would have it, Barry chose to enter in the middle of it, carrying a black medical bag. We looked at the bag, exchanged glances, and lost control all over again. Barry gave us a baleful look and continued on to the bathroom. In a bit we heard delicate rattling noises as he plumbed the pipes with forceps.