There's Nothing to Be Afraid Of

by Marcia Muller

  From Hank’s office I could hear conversation. Gilbert’s voice was subdued, a trifle whiny.

  I started down the hall, smiling to myself. It was going to be all right. All Souls would survive, and probably be stronger for all this conflict. And my job would be secure. My job . . .

  Halfway to the living room, I stopped, realizing I was still carrying the letter. Something made me look at it again, read it through carefully.

  “Those italics . . .

  My smile became a frown, and I stood still for a minute or two, my thoughts in confusion, facts refusing to connect. Then I ran the rest of the way to the back of the house—and in a couple more minutes all the facts did connect.

  I now knew where Duc was—and who had murdered his friend, Hoa Dinh.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Don said, “You’d better let me go with you.”

  I gripped the phone receiver harder. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s my job, not yours.”

  “But it might be dangerous.”

  “No!”

  My exasperation was apparent, and on the other end of the line Don fell silent. He’d called All Souls just as I had been on my way out the door, hoping we could have a quiet drink or two. Instead I had presented him with the solution to a murder—possibly two—and a rescue plan. Now he was worried about my safety.

  “Sharon,” he said grimly, “go to the cops.”

  “I can’t.” But again I considered it. Maybe, given what I’d figured out, Greg would listen to me. If I called him back and explained. . . . But I knew Greg; he wouldn’t listen. The only way to wrap this matter up was to free Duc. Greg couldn’t refuse to hear his story. “I can’t,” I said again. “I’m counting on you to ensure that everything goes okay. If I don’t call you in exactly an hour, I want you to call the cops. Tell them you want to report a homicide in progress and give them the address—”

  “Homicide!”

  “It’s only a police code designation. It’ll get them there in a hurry.”

  “Sharon, for God’s sake, wait—”

  “Remember, exactly an hour from now.” I hung up and ran for the door.

  I pulled my car close to the scaffolding that flanked the Crystal Palace Theatre and shut off the engine and the lights. I took my flashlight from my bag, checked to make sure the gun was secure in the side pocket, and got out of the car. The night was still clear and even colder; the outlines of the old theatre were more hard-edged than they’d seemed in the post-rain mist the night before. I looked up and down the street, saw no one, and ran for the opening in the scaffolding. When I reached it, I stopped, listening. I could hear nothing but muted traffic sounds.

  The bare bulbs in the walkway beside the building were lit, and the narrow space was as eerie as a deserted stage set. Moving along close to the scaffolding, one hand holding the flashlight, the other poised above my gun, I approached the side door where Dolly and I had entered the night before. But when I tugged on the handle it wouldn’t open.

  All right, I thought, this can’t be the only entrance. The theatre would have a stage door, closer to the rear. I retraced my steps, stopping at the opening in the scaffolding to look out. The street was still deserted. I went on about twenty feet, into the shadow where the light from the string of bulbs didn’t reach, and found a small stairway that led up to another door. But when I climbed it and pulled on the knob, it wouldn’t budge.

  Of course after Otis Knox’s murder—and now I was pretty sure it had been murder—the police would have secured the premises. But there must be another way in, one that hadn’t been apparent to them. The person I was after had gotten inside many times, had taken Duc there. I’d continue to skirt the building until I found it.

  This last section of walkway was very dark. I switched on the flashlight and heard a quick scurrying sound. Rats. The city had a problem with them; not so bad as a few years before, but still a problem. I swung the light around to further scare them, then edged along the wall toward the rear of the building.

  It backed up on an alley where there was a loading dock. I boosted myself up on it and checked the door. It was the kind that raised up, and like the others it was secure. Sitting on the edge of the dock preparatory to jumping to the ground, I pondered the problem.

  Was it possible, I wondered, that he had previously been getting in by one of these three doors that were now locked? One that had never been secured until after the murder? If so, it meant that Duc had been trapped in there for over twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours without food or water, in a strange, dark place. I jumped down and continued my search.

  Halfway along the back wall of the theatre, I noticed a window at ground level. It appeared to open into the basement where the dressing rooms were—and where Knox had planned to located his sound stage. I knelt and examined it, found it was covered with heavy iron bars that were imbedded in the concrete frame. I shone the flashlight on the glass, but saw only the accumulated grime of decades.

  There were similar windows all the way down the alley, and I checked each carefully. All were barred, all were dark and begrimed. Once again I retraced my steps, pausing beside a garbage dumpster and staring up at the brick wall of the building on the other side of the alley. The wall was honeycombed with windows, but none of them was lighted, and some were boarded up. Not a sound—not even the movement of rats—broke the stillness in the alley.

  It was eerie being here in the heart of the city, yet so far removed from its life. Mere blocks away, people were swarming the streets and bars of the Tenderloin; a few blocks in the other direction, a different class of people were leaving the theatres, going to supper in elegant restaurants; and yards away, Duc was probably imprisoned, suffering . . .

  I renewed my search, but with a feeling of hopelessness now, shining the flashlight’s beam along the rear wall of the theatre. As it passed over each barred window, I noticed their even spacing and realized there should be another directly behind the dumpster.

  The space between it and the wall was narrow, but I bent over and wriggled in. My jacket caught on the corner of the dumpster, and I yanked on it, felt it tear, and kept going. My flash showed me the outline of a window—a window similar to the others, except it had no bars. Squatting down, I turned the light on the frame and saw where they had been hacked away. There was no glass either, and a piece of plywood had been fitted to the frame. I touched it and it clattered to the floor inside.

  I moved closer and thrust the upper part of my body through the hole, listening. No one came in response to the noise. In a few seconds, I moved the beam of light downward. It showed a gray cement floor. Shining the beam around, I spotted three old-fashioned white porcelain sinks and a counter with a mirror above it. Obviously a dressing room. The distance from the window to the floor was about seven feet.

  I stuffed the flash into my pocket and slipped feet first through the window, twisting around so I could grasp the sill with both hands. Then I let myself down and dropped to the floor. The air in there was damp and smelled of mildew. I listened again, heard no sound at all.

  Taking the flashlight back out, I shone it around for a closer look. The counter extended along one wall of the room, the sinks along the other. There were hooks and mirrors on the walls, but otherwise no furnishings. A door led into what must be a hallway.

  I went out there, listening once again, alert for even an intake of breath. The hall extended, black and silent, in both directions, and I turned right. A few doors opened of at intervals, and I looked cautiously through each. The rooms appeared to be dressing rooms like the one I’d entered through.

  The air became chilly as I worked my way through the rabbit warren of little interconnecting hallways. At one point, two spiral iron staircases led up to what I supposed where the wings of the stage overhead. Then more hallways branched off, and more rooms. Several had rough plywood shelves—property rooms, most likely. Another had a counter opening in the hall
way and clothes poles crisscrossed behind it—wardrobe. Still another seemed to have once been an office, with its old wooden file cabinets—which many an antique hound would have given his eye teeth for—still in place.

  I kept turning down one or another hallway, unsure whether I’d been there before or not. My footsteps padded lightly on the concrete, my clothing rustled, but otherwise there was no sound. Even the street noises were stilled, and I felt that by descending into this concrete cavern, I’d left the city entirely, perhaps even moved back in time. But in another time, these corridors would have been filled with life, populated by brightly costumed performers—keyed-up, preening, anxious to go on stage. Now the theatre was still as death. . . .

  As I neared the front of the building, I came to a large room with scenery flats stacked against its walls. I leaned against the doorframe, wondering what to do next. Duc wasn’t being held in any of the dressing rooms; even if I wasn’t certain I’d searched every one, this silence was so absolute that I knew no living thing shared it. There was no way Duc could have been present without me hearing a breath, a moan, a cry. Unless—

  I started into the room, shining my flashlight on the flats that were stacked to the left. Then I turned its beam straight ahead and sucked in my breath. The flat against the wall portrayed a barroom where shadowy figures sat drinking toasts, barely visible through what was supposed to be smoke-filled air.

  It fit. It fit so perfectly that I hesitate to believe it.

  I went up to the flat and tried to push it aside. It seemed solidly anchored. I ran around to the other end and tried to shove it in the opposite direction. It wouldn’t budge. I grabbed it, pulled, and it came forward, revealing the outline of a door in the concrete wall.

  The door appeared to have once been covered over with plaster-and-lathe, but that had been clumsily broken, ripped away. The plaster chunks and pieces of lathe were still on the floor, swept to one side. I stepped back and lower the flat to the ground; a cloud of plaster dust rose to my nostrils.

  This was what I’d been looking for.

  The door, as well as the debris from the demolished wall, seemed to have been deliberately hidden behind the flat. By whom? Otis Knox? I didn’t think so. He had mentioned his plan to get work crews in here, but not until next week. No, breaking through this wall was something that had been done without Knox’s consent or knowledge.

  I stepped over the corner of the flat and felt around the edges of the door. The space there was too narrow to get a grip on, but there was a hole where a knob had once been. I stuck my index finger into it and pulled. The door yielded with a faint squeak of protest. Ahead of me loomed a musty-smelling black space, and concrete stairs leading downward.

  I trained the flashlight on the steps and went down them. The floor at the bottom was black tiles that looked to be imitation marble. It was very dark in there, and I raised the flashlight.

  Directly ahead, maybe twenty feet away, was a heavy wooden bar, the kind that graced the old-fashioned saloons. Its brass foot-rail flashed as I moved the light along it. Behind the bar was a mirrored wall, one large expanse of beveled glass surrounded by a grandiose carved frame. Bottles gleamed dustily on shelves that had been set up against the mirror—bottled that were draped in cobwebs and filled with the rich dark amber of whiskies and rums and brandies.

  I swung the light to the right and saw small tables with chairs pushed neatly to them. The tables were topped in black marble and the chairs had seats padded in deep rose velvet. Against the walls beyond them were banquettes, upholstered in the same velvet. At intervals stood large pots that once might have held palms.

  It was so nineteen-twenties, I thought. Secretive and exquisitely naughty. An intimate little place for people who wanted to engage in sophisticated, genteel, and illegal tippling.

  The remoteness I’d felt before intensified as I stepped into this pocket of frozen time. San Francisco as I knew it ceased to exist. I could forget the eighties, the sixties, the year of my birth. They simply hadn’t happened.

  I’d found the rumored speakeasy, the one the owners of the Crystal Palace had tunneled out from the theatre during Prohibition. The reason it hadn’t been discovered when work had been going on for BART and the Muni Metro was that it was under the sidewalk, not the street. The subsequent owners—including Otis Knox—had doubted its existence, but here it was. It had been waiting for decades in suspended animation, waiting to be rediscovered. And it had been—but not by me.

  What had caused the owners to wall off the speak, leaving everything in tact, every glass in its rack, chairs carefully pushed to the tables? The end of Prohibition, of course. But why? Because they realized that the speak was no longer a profitable enterprise? Perhaps they’d left it this way as a bit of whimsy, a desire to preserve a relic of a soon-to-be-forgotten era. I would never know. . . .

  I crossed the floor, swinging the light to one side, to an alcove that had probably been the checkroom. A cot stood there, a folding cot with a fluffy pillow and a striped olive-green spread. And olive-green sheets. Next to it was a wooden table that held an oil lamp, a transistor radio, and a stack of books.

  I moved along the bar toward the alcove. Everything fit. Everything—

  There was a faint groan behind me.

  I whirled. “Duc?” I said.

  The groan came again. I moved the beam over the wall next to the back bar. There was a door in it with heavy iron hinges. A storeroom? Refrigerated compartment? It didn’t matter. I ran over and tugged on the latch.

  The heavy door swung toward me. Again I saw only blackness. Then I shone the flash down and saw Duc, lying on the floor, a cloth tied over his mouth, arms bound behind him. He rolled over, groaning louder now, and as I knelt, he looked up at me with imploring eyes.

  It’s all right, Duc,” I said, working at the tight knot in the cloth. “It’s going to be all right; you’re safe now.”

  Duc groaned louder. I dug my nails into the knot. One of them broke, but the knot held. Finally I yanked at the material. It tore, and I pulled it from Duc’s face.

  He drew in huge, gasping breaths while I attached the rope that bound his wrists. His feet had been left free—there was no place he could go in this little storeroom. The rope was tied as tight as the cloth had been, and I finally pulled him into a semi-sitting position. “Just another couple of minutes,” I said, “and I’ll have you out of here.”

  Duc moistened his cracked lips. “Thank you.” His voice rasped hoarsely.

  Relieved that he was in good shape enough to speak, I said, “When did he bring you here?”

  “He . . . I came myself.”

  The knot was a little loser now. “Why?”

  “Dolly. After Dolly. I knew. I had seen. Before, I had seen.” He paused, gasping. “I came downstairs. Down where they had been before. I looked, but there were only lights. They were not there.”

  “And then?” The knot was loosening, slowly.

  “Then he—” Duc broke off, and I saw his sudden panic. His hoarse voice cried, “Look out!”

  I let go of him and whirled around, reaching for my gun.

  Jimmy Milligan stood in the doorway to the speakeasy.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Jimmy stood still, feet planted wide apart, hands balled into fists. The beam of my flashlight, reflected around the room by the dusty mirror behind the bar, showed his face to be more dismayed than angry.

  I raised my gun and stood up slowly, putting a calming pressure on Duc’s shoulder with my free hand.

  Jimmy looked at the gun. His dismay turned to bewilderment, then fear. He raised his hands in a supplicating gesture and said, “‘Cast a cold eye . . . on life, on death . . . horseman, pass by.’”

  The words had to be from Yeats, and the response, like most of Jimmy’s was slightly skewed. But now that I knew the poems he chose to recite were reflective in an oblique way of his reality, I could understand what he was saying.

  I said gently, “It’s al
l right, Jimmy. The dark horseman will pass by. I’m not going to kill you. Anymore than you were going to kill Duc.”

  His gaze moved to the young man on the floor. “‘Come away, O human child . . . to the waters and the wild . . .’”

  It was the poem that had told me Jimmy had kidnapped Duc—Yeats’ “The Stolen Child.” He’d recited this refrain to me that morning while Brother Harry was ranting outside the Sensuous Showcase Theatre. And he’d been crying, probably because the kidnapping was an act he was ashamed of.

  “Come away—’” he said, again.

  “We’ll come away, Jimmy,” I said. “We’ll all come away together. You, me and Duc.”

  He looked back at me, his face calmer now. “Where?”

  “Where would you like to go?”

  “The lake isle of Innisfree?”

  It was the title of another Yeats poem. “That’s sounds fine to me.” I glanced at Duc. “Can you stand up?”

  “Yes.”

  Still holding the gun on Jimmy, I helped Duc to his feet. He was unsteady and leaned against the edge of the bar for support.

  “It’s pretty there,” Jimmy said.

  “I’m sure it is.”

  “You can help me build my cabin of clay and wattles. I’ll grow beans and keep bees. And be at peace.”

  “That’s good, to be at peace.” I wanted to keep him calm and talking until Duc could walk.

  “Yes. We can be at peace at Innisfree. That’s what Yeats said: ‘And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow.’”

  “Then that’s where we’ll go—” I stopped, hearing a noise beyond the door to the speakeasy. It sounded like stealthy footsteps coming down one of the hallways.

  Jimmy heard it too. His head snapped to the left and he tensed, listening.

  The footsteps came into the room outside the door and stopped. It couldn’t be the police, not enough time had gone by . . .

  I stepped toward Jimmy, slowly. “Tell me more about the isle of Innisfree.”