There's Nothing to Be Afraid Of

by Marcia Muller

  Hank took off his glasses and wiped tears of laughter from the corners of his eyes. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “the guy really puts you in a fighting mood, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes. You?”

  “Yes.” He grinned across the desk at me, and once more I felt the camaraderie we’d always shared—employer and employee but, more important, friend and friend. The way we’d been for years; the way All Souls had been too.

  Hank said, “I haven’t had a really good battle with anybody in quite a while. To tell you the truth, I’m kind of looking forward to the one that’s coming up.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  There was no sign of Gilbert when I went down the hall toward my office, but Ted was at his desk, typing with a jauntiness I hadn’t seen him exhibit in months. He motioned to me and said, “Bugs Bunny put in a call to have your car towed.”

  “I kind of thought he would.”

  “When he stormed outside to wait for the cops, I canceled the tow order.”

  “Thanks, Ted. I owe you a beer.”

  “It was my pleasure.”

  He went back to his typing and I went to my office and called my house to check on Barry, the contractor. He had been there, waiting to get in, when I’d returned home to change my clothes that morning. Now there was no answer. Perhaps, I told myself, he was too busy to pick up the phone. But I had to admit that didn’t sound like Barry. Next I called Carolyn Bui. She was still meeting with her Board of Directors, her secretary informed me. I hung up the receiver and slumped in my ratty old armchair, reflecting that I wasn’t the only one having difficulty at my place of work.

  My place of work. I looked around the tiny cubicle, with its sharply slanting ceiling and pale yellow walls that no amount of decoration had been able to make attractive. This office was really a converted closet; my salary was dismally low; there were few fringe benefits. If Gilbert’s faction won out in the struggle for control of All Souls and my job ceased to exist, I could get a job with one of the big agencies in town. I had a certain reputation and—even though part of it said I was unorthodox and unresponsive to authority—I knew there were a couple of outfits where I could pretty much write my own ticket. What would I be losing, anyway? A closet for an office and a paycheck that never stretched far enough.

  Wait a minute, an inner voice told me. For one thing, you’d be losing your freedom. There is—or at least there used to be—a warmth and companionship here, and they also leave you alone.

  But, I reminded myself, there would be extra money for the house renovation. And paid vacation. Maybe even a dental plan. Or a pension.

  What about a sense of purpose? the annoying voice asked. You feel like you’re doing something valuable here, something that counts.

  Does it? I thought. Sometimes I wonder. That’s the trouble with getting older. You start entertaining basic doubts about how much you’re accomplishing. And things like pensions and dental plans begin to matter more than ideals.

  Restlessly I got up and left the office, wandering down the hall to the living room at the back of the house. It was deserted, and I stood in front of the window, watching the play of wintry sunlight on the tangle of vegetation in the backyard. There was a brick-and-board bookcase under the window for the convenience of the clients who waited in that room for their appointments, as well as for the leisure reading of the residents. The books were well-worn, most of them donated by the attorneys, many looking like supplemental texts form long-forgotten college courses. I ran my fingers over them, aligning the spines an even inch from the edge of the shelf, and as I did so, I encountered a volume of Yeats’ poetry. Thinking of Jimmy Mulligan, I pulled it out and leafed through it until I found “All Souls Night.”

  As Mary Zemanek had said, the poem was eerie, all about wine glasses brimming with muscatel and ghosts coming to drink at midnight. I could picture a room straight out of a horror film: draped in cobwebs, deep in shadow, where spirits of the long-dead came to commune. Shivering, I turned the pages and read Jimmy’s other favorite, “The Song of Wandering Aengus.” It wasn’t very cheerful either, but at least it didn’t give me gooseflesh. Yeats seemed to have had a gloomy preoccupation with death; a number of his stanzas that ended in italicized lines dwelled on it: “She was more beautiful than thy first love, But now lies under boards” . . . “All things remain in God” . . . “And there the king is but as the beggar” . . . “What shall I do for pretty girls now my old bawd is dead?”

  Dammit, what was I doing reading poetry when I had a murder to investigate? I shut the book, put it back on the shelf, and located the living room phone by following its twenty-five-foot cord down the hallway to where the instrument sat outside the restroom. Red push-button phones with long cords were an All Souls tradition—one that caused more confusion than convenience, owing to the residents’ practice of wandering while talking and then abandoning the phones wherever they were when they hung up.

  I sat crosslegged on the hallway floor and punched in the number of the Sensuous Showcase Theatre. No, the woman told me, Mr. Knox had not returned before going home. And no, she still could not give me the phone number at the ranch.

  I hung up and thought of Knox’s insistence that he was just a country boy at heart. He’s said, “By nightfall, I’m back home with my horse.” Home, on his ranch in Marin County. Nicasio, he’d said.

  I was now four-thirty and the first wave of commuters would be creeping across the Golden Gate Bridge and up the Waldo Grade into Marin County. Buses would be whizzing along in the special lanes allotted for them on the southbound side of the freeway, but traffic would still be slowed to a crawl by the time I reached San Rafael and the exit I needed to take for Nicasio. I wanted to talk to Otis Knox, thought, and I could brood as well in traffic as in my office.

  I was leery of going out to Knox’s ranch without leaving word of my whereabouts, so I scribbled a short note to Hank, telling him he should contact the Marin County Sheriff’s Department if I didn’t check in with him by nine that evening. After slipping it under his office door, I left the building, circumventing Gilbert, who was now in the law library, throwing a tantrum about police inefficiency.

  The Nicasio Valley lies in the western part of Marin County, pocketed in the section between San Rafael and the sea. It is long and narrow, surrounded by lightly wooded hills and dotted with cattle and horse ranches. By the time I reached it, dusk had fallen, and the lights of ranch buildings shone faintly through thick stands of oak, madrone, and eucalyptus. Just outside the little village for which the valley is named, a knobby hill reared up, its rocky outcroppings and stunted trees casting eerie shadows in the fading light.

  The village centered on a square, most of which was a softball diamond. Across the road to one side was a white country church with a red roof and steeple, and directly ahead of me was a group of frame buildings that housed the post office and a restaurant. The post office would be closed by now, but perhaps someone at the restaurant could tell me how to find Otis Knox’s ranch.

  I was already stopped in the parking lot when I realize the place was deserted. There were no other cars, and the only light was the red beacon on the volunteer fire department up the road. The restaurant must either be closed for good or for the slow winter season when few people ventured out for drives in the hills of West Marin. I put the car in reverse, backed up and continued around the deserted square.

  On its third side were a couple of houses, a realty office, an antique store, and an odd humped-backed building called the Druids’ Hall. All the businesses were dark and closed up. A few yards past them, the road curved sharply in front of a house with big trees and a white picket fence. As I braked and made the turn, I reflected that it would take a braver person than I to live there, what with the headlights of every car sweeping over my front windows and the imminent possibility of one veering out of control and ending up in my living room.

  At the end of the curve, I found myself back at Nicasio Valley Road, where I’d come in.
I paused there, then decided to ask questions at one of the houses on the other side of the square. After turning left, I drove along its perimeter once more, past the old church to the intersection near the post office. I was about to turn again when I spotted a pair of headlight beams coming around the corner from where the main road branched off again to the west. A mud-splattered white pick-up truck drove into the parking area in front of the post office, and a man got out carrying some letters.

  By the time he turned back from the mailbox, I had pulled in beside his truck and gotten out. He was a big bearded man in work clothes and heavy boots, and he stopped, shading his eyes from the glare of my headlights. I crossed to him, pulling my jacket tight against the unexpectedly chill air.

  “Help you, lady?” The man’s voice held soft country accents.

  “I hope so. I’m trying to locate a ranch near here; it belongs to a man called Otis Knox.

  “Knox? Name’s not familiar. He in cattle or horses?”

  “Horses, I think.”

  The man considered, then said, “I breed Arabians myself, and I don’t know anyone named Knox. Is it a big spread?”

  “Probably not too big.”

  Again he paused, then shook his head. “Doesn’t ring a bell. Sorry I can’t help you.”

  Inwardly I chided myself for coming out here without more information. Of course Otis Knox, porno king, was not about to advertise his presence in this conservative ranching country. Still, anyone as eccentric as he would surely have attracted some attention . . .

  “Wait a second,” I said. “This ranch is a little strange. The fellow collects things. He’s got a pair of golden arches form McDonald’s—”

  “Oh, sure, that place. Folks call if Junk Food West. Guy’s some kind of crazy millionaire, a movie producer they say. Likes his privacy. Otis Knox is his name?”

  “Yes. Can you tell me how to get there?”

  “Sure can.” He led me around his pick-up truck and pointed back the way I’d come. “You follow Nicasio Valley Road down to the fork; it’s just a little ways. Bear left, onto Lucas Valley Road, maybe half a mile. The place is on the right, over a wooden bridge. You can see them arches right through the trees.”

  “I thanked him, got in my car, and drove as he’d directed me. Lucas Valley Road was easy to find, but there were a number of places set back on the opposite side of a small creek, and many of them could be reached by wooden bridges that spanned the gully. I followed the road for two miles, then doubled pack, peering into the thick woods for Knox’s golden arches. It was full dark now, and I could see little more than the glimmer of distant lights beyond the trees.

  When I reached the fork where the roads came together, I turned and started back. Otis Knox, the “movie-producer,” liked his privacy; it would stand to reason that he would not put his name on the mailbox. His neighbors, on the other hand, seemed fond of large stylized lettering and elaborately carved signs.

  I drove slowly, looking for an unmarked private road, and when one appeared about three-quarters of a smile from the fork, I turned in and rumbled over the rustic bridge. The drive wound through a stand of eucalyptus and then came out in flat pastureland. The dark shadows of the arches rose incongruously in front of a sprawling ranch house with flagstone facing around the front entry. I had barely stopped the car when floodlights came on, illuminating the arches in all their gaudy yellow splendor.

  A black Ford Bronco was parked between the arches. By the time I pulled up next to it and got out of the MG, the door of the house had opened and Otis Knox stepped out. He was dressed, as before in cowboy garb, and cradled a rifle in his arms. His stance, while easy, was alert. One careful fellow, this Mr. Knox.

  When he saw who I was, he relaxed slightly. “Hey, honey,” he called, “you came to meet Babe the Blue Ox.”

  “I sure did.”

  “Had quite a job finding me, I bet.”

  I nodded.

  “But you managed anyway.”

  “Of course—I am a detective.”

  When I came up to him, Knox took one hand off the rifle and shook mine. In spite of his light words, his expression was wary. I smiled, trying to put him off his guard, and he smiled back, but the warmth didn’t touch his eyes. “How do you like my golden arches?” he asked.

  “They’re very impressive. How’d you get them here?”

  “Flatbed truck.”

  “Must have caused quite a stir among your neighbors.”

  “It had them wondering.” Abruptly he turned and started for the house. “Come on, I’ll show you the rest of the place.”

  The exterior of the house—with the exception of the arches—was what you might see in any affluent suburb, but the interior looked like the playroom of a mad child. The slate-floored entry was filled with the kind of coin-operated machines that give forth with gumballs or plastic prizes, and in the archway between it and the living room stood a mechanical bull. The only normal object in the living room was a grouping of low, modular couches and chairs upholstered in a deep red. The rest was a mélange that made the décor I’d seen in Knox’s office seem tame.

  Along the left-hand wall was a bar with stools that reproduced an old-fashioned ice cream parlor. Opposite it, five jukeboxes of various vintages lined up against the right-hand wall. There was a red-and-gold popcorn cart on wheels, half full of popped kernels; an ancient Coca-Cola machine; a three-foot-high statue of Donald Duck that apparently would quack at you if you fed it a quarter; an equally tall green ceramic frog hat sat open-mouthed beside one of the modular chairs; and a pinball machine, 1950s model. Over all of this, darting silver lights flashed, and when I looked up I saw a mirrored globe that once must have hung in a ballroom.

  Knox had set down the rifle and was watching me expectantly. “Well, what do you think?”

  “I’m stunned.”

  He nodded. “Most people are. But now for the piece de resistance.” He crossed the room and pulled open the drapes that covered the back wall. A picture window overlooked the pastureland behind the house, with a stable and paddocks in the foreground and the looming shape of the mountains beyond. And dominating this pastoral scene was the floodlit figure of Babe the Blue Ox.

  Babe was enormous, at least a dozen feet tall. His flanks bulged out as if he’d eaten all the cheeseburgers and fries the defunct Paul Bunyan Drive-in in Corvallis, Oregon, had ever served up. His fat cheeks puffed in bovine contentment. His eyelids drooped languidly. He was very blue. Not baby blue, or powder blue, or even just ordinary blue-blue. No, Babe was electric blue. Blue as the bluest neon sign.

  “Good Lord,” I said.

  Knox smiled, obviously taking my words as an expression of admiration. “Something, isn’t he?”

  “Something.”

  He closed the drapes again and came toward me. “Hey, sit down, relax. You want a beer?”

  “I could certainly use one.”

  He went over to the Coke machine and fed it a slug from a bowl that sat on the top of it. What came out was Stroh’s. He got another, opened them, and handed one to me. Then we went to the grouping of furniture and sat down opposite one another. Knox reached in his shirt pocket for a cigarette and matches, and when he had waved the match out, he put it into the mouth of the ceramic frog.

  “The frog’s supposed to be a plant holder,” he said, “but I don’t like crap like plants. So I use it for an ashtray.”

  I merely shook my head in amusement. Knox, with his boyish enthusiasm for his toys, seemed a harmless eccentric, and I took a long sip of beer while I reminded myself that in actuality he was a dangerous man. Knox was a ruthless operator in an industry that—much as he liked to portray it as sort of a home for wayward girls—routinely destroyed lives and people. I shifted my beer to my left hand and let my right one stray to the comforting bulge my .38 Special made in the outside pocket of my shoulder bag. While I normally didn’t believe in carrying the gun, tonight was one of those occasions when I felt safer with it.

 
Knox was watching me now, the wary light back in his eyes. “So what do I owe the honor of this visit to?” he said. “You didn’t come all the way out here just to meet Babe.”

  ‘No.”

  As I’d hoped, he quickly supplied his own perception of my motives. “You want to talk some more about those old boys—Brother Harry and Jimmy Milligan.”

  “Yes. I’m even more interested in what goes on in that neighborhood now. You’ve heard about the murder at the Globe Hotel?”

  “Oh, yeah. One of the slopes. Too bad.” He swigged beer, unconcerned.

  I controlled my flaring anger and said, “Yes, it was too bad. And I’d think you’d be a little more worried.”

  “Why?”

  “Well—what if the killer is the man who preaches in front of your theatre every day?”

  Knox shrugged. “Honey, there are killers all over the Tenderloin. They bump people off in bar brawls, or while they’re mugging bag ladies, or rolling drunks. They push adulterated dope. Sometimes we’re lucky and they bump themselves off instead. But it’s a way of life there.”

  “What if this killer has more of a motive than just random violence?”

  “This killer? You mean Harry?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What motive would old Harry have?”

  “That’s what I’m hoping you can tell me.”

  “Me? Honey, I’m just—”

  “I know; you’re just a country boy. You don’t know anything about what goes on in the neighborhood, in spite of having done business on that corner for—what did you tell me?—fifteen years.”

  “That’s right.” He smiled blandly at me.

  “And I suppose you don’t know anything about the people at the Globe Hotel, either.”

  He reached into his pocket for another cigarette, frowning. “Like I said, I don’t have anything to do with that bunch of slopes.”

  “They’re not all ‘slopes,’ Otis.”

  “No? Well, maybe not. I wouldn’t know. I just mind my own business, look out for my theatres, and then—”