There's Nothing to Be Afraid Of

by Marcia Muller

  “But why did you tell?”

  “Because I was more concerned about finding out who killed Hoa Dinh than I was about your feelings. I’m sorry it hurt you.”

  She looked at me for a moment, twisting a length of white corsage ribbon around her fingers. Finally she said, “You might as well sit down,” and nodded brusquely at the other stool.

  I sat, glad she’d accepted the apology.

  “I shouldn’t have gotten mad,” she said. “I know past mistakes follow a person. But I was so young when it happened, in my early twenties. I was babysitting a relative’s kid—”

  “You don’t have to tell me this.”

  “No, I want to. You see, I was angry about the babysitting. These relatives were visiting from Modesto, and everyone was off at a neighborhood street fair—this was in the Mission, back in the days when it used to be nice—but they left me to take care of the kid. Fat, plain Sallie—she didn’t deserve to have any fun. Keep her at home where no one will see what a hog she is. That was the way they all treated me.”

  She pulled the ribbon tight until it bit into her podgy fingers. “Anyway, the kid was just a baby in his crib. And all he did was scream. He yelled and yelled until I couldn’t take it anymore, and I put a pillow over his face. I didn’t mean to hurt him, but he was so little, and I didn’t know my own strength.” She was silent for a moment, staring down at her hands; then she looked up at me—timidly, as if she was afraid she’d disgusted me.

  Carefully I said, “You were right in what you called it before—a mistake. A tragic mistake.”

  Relief spread over her fleshy features and she began to unwind the ribbon from her fingers. “It was tragic in a lot of ways. For the baby’s parents. For my family. I lost them, you know; they never spoke to me again. I’ve lived in the Tenderloin for twenty-five years, ever since I got out of prison. I’ve got a brother across town in Noe Valley and a sister in Saint Francis Wood. Both of them have grown children I’ve never even seen. I paid for that mistake, I tell you. I paid.”

  “I know you did. We won’t talk about it again.”

  She nodded and looked over her shoulder. A man in a Santa Claus suit stood there, a mixed bouquet in his hand, a concerned look on his face. He said, “Everything all right, Sallie?”

  “Fine, Mr. Claus. My friend and I were just having a discussion about . . . someone who died.” She got up and wrapped the bouquet for him.

  When she sat down again, I said, “His name isn’t really Mr. Claus, is it?”

  She grinned. “No, it’s Forbes. He’s a retired actor, used to be big in Hollywood. Knew all the important people, went to all the fancy parties. But then he couldn’t get work and was forced to come up here and live with his daughter. During the Christmas season, he’s a Santa at Macy’s.”

  I wondered how much of that was true, decided none of it, but the Santa Claus part, and then decided it didn’t matter anyway. Personally, I liked the idea of an out-of-work actor playing his yearly role as Santa, liked to think of old Mr. Forbes going to all those fancy parties with the important Hollywood crowd. Some people would call Sallie’s imagination lies; I called them her way of preserving her enthusiasm for life. And I sensed she only made things up about inessential matters. About those that counted, such as the questions I was about to ask her, she would be scrupulously truthful.

  “Sallie,” I said, “I came down here to ask you about Brother Harry, the street preacher.”

  “What about him?”

  “Do you know if he ever had any dealings with Otis Knox?”

  She considered. “Well, he’s always on the corner in front of the theatre. He arrives there in the morning and preaches until someone runs him off. And they don’t keep him away for long. He goes and gets a sandwich or a cup of coffee and comes right back again.”

  “Is there any reason he chose that particular corner?”

  “I guess the theatre. It’s kind of an obvious example of what Harry hates.”

  “I wonder if there might be some less obvious reason. Did you ever see Harry with Otis Knox?”

  “Only when they were hollering at each other on the street. Knox seemed to enjoy it as much as Harry.”

  “You never saw them talking?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “Does Harry talk to anyone in the neighborhood?”

  “Anyone who will listen. But I don’t call that talking; it’s more like a harangue.”

  “About what?”

  “Coming to God, what else?”

  “Who does listen to Harry?”

  “Nobody. But some people get buttonholed by him and put up with it for a while. That happened to the Vietnamese in our building when they first moved in. Even after they figured him out, they’d be polite. They’re real well-mannered people. But when he started bothering the young girls, the parents got firm with him.”

  “Harry bothers young girls?”

  My face must have reflected what I was thinking, because Sallie said, “Oh, not in that way. He just lectures them about stuff like their hair styles and tight jeans and makeup. The parents, including the Dinhs and the Vangs, went to Mary Zemanek and asked her to keep him out of the building. And they told the girls to avoid him on the street.”

  “Mary Zemanek really has her hands full, the way people can just walk into that lobby. Why don’t they have a buzzer system?”

  “Roy LaFond shell out for buzzer system?”

  I smiled. “I see what you mean.” After a moment, I added, “Harry was preaching a sermon on Otis Knox’s death this morning. It really upset the cashier at the theatre.”

  “Trust Harry to capitalize on someone else’s tragedy.” Sallie stood up, made change for a man who wanted a poinsettia plant, then returned. “I don’t know what’s wrong with that man,” she went on. “He’s so full of hate.”

  “Maybe it was something in his childhood.”

  “Yeah, that’s the excuse they’re always trying to make for the crazy ones.” In better spirits now, Sallie dragged a bucket of red carnations over and began fashioning corsages. “But with me it doesn’t wash. Harry’s had a lot of years to get over his childhood, however bad it was. Look at me: I had a terrible early life, but I’ve made something of myself in spite of it.”

  “Yes, you have.”

  She grinned shyly at me. “Aw, you don’t have to agree with me. I know a flower concession isn’t much. But I work, I earn my keep, I’ve made a nice home for myself, even if it is in a Tenderloin hotel.”

  “That’s better than a lot of your neighbors have done,” I said absently, my mind on Harry’s choice of the corner in front of the Sensuous Showcase Theatre for his “church.”

  “I’ll say. You know, when I was in prison I tried to educate myself. I took what classes were offered and got books from the library. I even tried to write.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I thought I would be good at it, on account of the way I like to make up stories about the people I meet. But somehow the words wouldn’t string together right. What was in my mind wouldn’t come out on paper.”

  “I know the feeling.” Perhaps there was some hidden reason why Harry had chosen that corner. Some connection between him and Knox.

  “After I realized I wasn’t going to be a writer, I decided to try something more practical,” Sallie went on. “Learn a skill so I could better myself when I was paroled. For a while I studied bookkeeping; a good bookkeeper can always get a job. But all those columns of numbers . . . and things never balanced.”

  “Sounds like my checkbook.” Dammit, there had to be a connection somewhere.

  “Trouble is, my teacher explained to me, I’ve got too much imagination. I’d be writing down the numbers and my mind would wander, and pretty soon I’d have left one out. So here I am, just an old flower seller, playing with roses to make ends meet.” Sallie said it cheerfully, clearly content with her lot in life. Then she peered at my face. “You still troubling yourself about Harry?”
<
br />   “Yes. I wish I knew more about him.”

  “I don’t know who could tell you. There’s a lot of people like him in the Tenderloin—myself included. We see each other every day, but nobody really knows anybody else. Maybe it’s better that way.”

  “Maybe.” I looked at my watch and saw it was time I went to meet Don and Carolyn.

  As I stood up to go, Sallie plucked a yellow rose from a nearby bucket and pinned it to my lapel. “A peace offering,” she said. “I’m sorry I hollered at you. Are we friends?”

  “We’re friends,” I said—and meant it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Temple Bar was dark and crowded with people in business attire, drinking and talking while they waited for tables. I squeezed through them, murmuring apologies when I snagged my elbow on a woman’s purse and banged into a man’s briefcase. When I came in sight of the bar, I spotted Don hunched over a glass of red wine, in earnest conversation with the bartender. I went up behind him and touched his shoulder.

  Don glanced at me and said to the bartender, “I’ll give you a call.”

  The man nodded conspiratorially and moved away.

  “What was that about?” I said as Don swung around on his stool to greet me.

  “He’s got a friend with a story I might want to use for a one-in-four.”

  “Graft and corruption in high places?”

  “That’s the right term for it—in high-rise construction. The bartender’s friend is pissed off at a consortium of developers who ousted him, and he might be willing to rat on their connections with City Hall.”

  I smiled, marveling at how Don could walk into a bar, strike up a conversation with the barkeep, and come up with a possible story—all at the busy noon hour.

  He said, “They’re holding a table for us.”

  That was another of his rare talents—to have a table held while others stood in line. I said, “I hope there’s room for three. After I talked to you, I asked Carolyn Bui to join us. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Carolyn Bui—that’s the Eurasian lady who hired you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Great. I like her. She struck me as a pretty impressive woman, the way she handled herself after that mess last spring.” He was referring to the case I’d been on when I’d met Carolyn.

  “Yes, she is—” I broke off as I saw her emerging from the crowd behind us.

  I reintroduced Don and Carolyn, and then we went to our table and ordered drinks. Deciding to get the bad news over with quickly, I told her about Greg ordering me off the case and Duc Vang’s disappearance. Carolyn’s face clouded and when the waiter set down her Campari and soda, she took a hefty sip of it.

  “God,” she said, “that family has been through so much! I’ll go by the hotel on the way back to the office and see if there’s anything I can do for them. As for you, Sharon, it’s too bad you can’t follow up on this, but I understand why you don’t want to put your license in jeopardy. I guess we’ll just have to rely on San Francisco’s finest.” Her mouth twisted bitterly; Carolyn had had her fill of cops the previous spring.

  The waiter came back and recited the specials. I debated the fish—red snapper—then opted for the fettuccine with clam sauce. Don grinned knowingly; given the choice between something healthy and pasta, I’d pick the latter every time.

  The sourdough bread wasn’t fresh, since it was Wednesday, the day the bakeries were closed, but Don and Carolyn attacked it as if it were straight out of the oven. I toyed with a small piece, listening to him quiz her about the Refugee Assistance Center’s programs. The dim light inside the restaurant did indeed match my dark mood, and the cheerful din of noontime voices around us only made me feel lower. Even the occasional touch of Don’s hand on my arm didn’t lift my spirits.

  Our lunches came. I ordered another glass of wine—something I didn’t usually do in the middle of the day—and pushed the fettuccine around, half-heartedly looking for the clams. Carolyn and Don were talking about the Hmong, the Laotian tribe without a written language. I tuned the conversation out and thought about Brother Harry.

  I liked the idea that there might be some connection between the street preacher and Otis Knox, something that wasn’t readily apparent to the casual observer. But how could I figure out what that connection was? The information I had on Harry was sparse, just that he lived in a flophouse on Turk Street and that his last name might be Woods. And those facts had come from Otis Knox; if he and Harry were involved in something—and knowing Knox, it would have been something less than legal—then he would not have told me the truth.

  Of course I could try to get at the connection from another angle, by looking into Knox’s life. But that would be risky, since the police would probably be doing the same thing. Still, there was nothing to keep me from hunting up a copy of that newspaper interview with Knox and reacquainting myself with the facts. And perhaps I could get hold of the reporter who had written it and quiz him about his impressions of the porno king. What was his name, anyway? Ellis. Yes, Jeff Ellis. He’d never returned the call I’d made the other day, nor had J.D. Smith. I should stop by the Chronicle building . . .

  “That’s true,” Carolyn was saying to Don. “Orange County is considered the leading center of Vietnamese life in this country. Specifically the stretch of Bolsa Avenue that passes through Garden Grove and Westminster—they have over two hundred Vietnamese shops and offices within a mile. But in Northern California, San Jose is beginning to rival that. There are over four hundred Vietnamese-owned businesses in Santa Clara County, and they also have the first refugee-owned commercial bank in Northern California.

  Neither she nor Don seemed to have noticed my preoccupation, so I tuned out again. It seemed trivial, discussing Chamber of Commerce statistics about the refugees when one of them had been brutally murdered and Duc was missing—or on the run. For that matter, my plan of talking to the Chronicle reporter seemed pretty trivial too. I didn’t know for sure it Otis Knox’s death was connected with either Hoa Dinh’s murder or Duc’s disappearance. In fact, I didn’t even know for sure if Knox had been murdered. All this speculation about Brother Harry could be irrelevant. What mattered was Duc’s whereabouts. Find Duc, and I could get the answers to quite a few questions.

  Find Duc. What I needed was to take action, go out into the neighborhood and canvass the residents to see if any of them had seen him. If I talked to enough people, surely I’d find one who knew something. And if they were aware that Duc was missing, they’d be on the lookout for him. But I couldn’t go back to the Tenderloin without risking a run-in with the police.

  I pushed the fettuccine around some more, ate a clam, sipped wine. Carolyn was talking about her problem in getting funded; Don was properly sympathetic; my mind wandered back to Hoa Dinh.

  What connection was there between Hoa and Duc and Otis Knox? What possible connection between two alienated young Vietnamese men and one of San Francisco’s top pornography producers? Only Duc’s sister. Duc might have killed Knox because of what he’d done to Dolly, but I couldn’t believe he would have harmed his best friend. So maybe I was dealing with two killers. . . .

  Dammit, I needed to get back out there and ask questions! And that was impossibility.

  “. . . sounds like something I could do one of my one-in-four shows on,” Don was saying. “This is an important issue here in the Bay Area, but I’m not sure how many people are aware of it. Our listeners should be informed about the impact the refugees are having on the city.”

  “What?” I said.

  He smiled at me. “You’re really not with us today, babe. I was just telling Carolyn I’d like to do a one-in-four on the refugee problem. What’s going on now, what’s likely to happen in the future, a little historical background—”

  I stared at him. “What a terrific idea!”

  He frowned, clearly puzzled. I was interested in his shows, but I usually didn’t get this carried away over them.

  “Don,” I said, “t
oday’s Wednesday, the day of your talk show.”

  “Yes, we’re running the tape of the Big Money Band—”

  “It’s not a one-in-four, then?”

  “No.”

  “How flexible is KSUN about when you do them?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Could you do a one-in-four tonight?”

  “I suppose so.” He glanced at Carolyn, who also looked puzzled. “There’s no reason I have to use that particular tape. But I don’t have anyone lined up for a one-in-four who could come in on this short notice.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  Suddenly Carolyn’s eyes brightened, and she nodded, realizing what I was about to propose. Don continued to frown.

  “Look, Don,” I went on, “I was thinking just now about the missing man, Duc Vang, and how if people were aware of his disappearance, someone might come forward with a lead. Normally I’d go out and ask questions in the neighborhood, but I can’t do it without getting into trouble with the police. But if we were to make people aware over the radio . . .”

  He nodded, waiting.

  “KSUN has a big audience in the Tenderloin—one of the women who lives at the Globe told me that, and I’ve heard it coming over radios in the stores down there. So I’m certain many of the refugees listen to it, and they’d be sure to pay special attention to a program about themselves.”

  “So what you’re saying is that I should do a show in which I interview Carolyn about the refugee problem, and at the end she’d ask for information about this Duc Vang?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.” Carolyn leaned forward and put a hand on my arm. “Don can interview me about the refugees, but I think the plea for information should come from you.”

  “Me?” I said.

  “Yes. A private detective would be more interesting to everyone. You’d really make them sit up and take notice. You could say you were working on this case, and then ask that people call in—”

  “I couldn’t!”