Where Echoes Live

by Marcia Muller

  “Shar?”

  “Rae, thanks. Have you been able to get a line on Hopwood’s daughter?”

  “I’m on my way to Vital Statistics now.”

  “Now? Why were you so late getting down there?”

  A silence. Then she said a trifle testily, “I overslept this morning. I was up late last night entertaining your mother while you were off God knows where, and she’s not an easy lady to keep pace with. Holds her liquor far better than I do.”

  “Well, I didn’t ask you to entertain her—or to drink yourself into a hangover. And the ‘God knows where’ that I was off to was a stakeout.”

  Another long pause. “I didn’t mind entertaining her, Shar. We had fun. It’s called having a life. Maybe you should try that sometime.” And then she hung up on me.

  I blinked in surprise and just sat there, the receiver still pressed to my ear. Throughout our worst times Rae had never spoken to me like that, much less hung up on me. Our relationship, both professional and personal, had broken down completely, and I wasn’t sure what I should do about it.

  The dial tone bored into my eardrum. I set the receiver down. A clearing of the air between my assistant and me had become necessary, and I knew it had better happen soon. But first I had to set out on my self-appointed rounds.

  Said rounds began at Ong’s house, still silent and deserted in the noonday sun. At Barbary Park I couldn’t get past the security guard in the lobby. When I called up to the Erickson town house, the Filipino maid answered and said her employer had gone out of town, but I doubted that, since there had been a notice in the morning paper of a memorial service to be held for Mick tomorrow afternoon. I left a message for Margot to call me as soon as she returned, then drove over to Telegraph Hill. No one answered my ring at any of the three apartments in the Transpacific-owned building.

  I arrived at the Sino-American Alliance half an hour late but bearing two pastrami-and-cheese sandwiches, two enormous garlic dills, and a small container of potato salad. Cheung was hunched over the light table examining a batch of color slides; her mouth dropped open when she saw the injuries to my face.

  “Not Ong,” I said quickly. “I had a run-in with a reluctant witness.”

  She picked up on the finality of my tone and tactfully didn’t press me for details. After she’d enthusiastically pawed through the contents of the lunch sack, she went to fetch the promised beers, and as before, we settled down on the floor of the office. I’d felt so rotten that morning that I’d been certain I wouldn’t eat all day; now my appetite had returned to its normal ravenous level.

  I expected Cheung to play the cassette of the interview, but she merely tossed it on her desk and attacked her sandwich. When I asked if she didn’t want to listen to the tape, she waved the suggestion aside. “Whatever you’ve got, I’ll use it. It’s the son of a bitch’s own fault that he ducked out before you were finished.”

  I toyed with my pickle, wondering how far I could trust Cheung. She watched me with keen reporter’s eyes, again picking up on a nuance but not prying. After a moment I opted for confiding in her; after all, she’d trusted me enough to allow me to do something that could have gotten her into serious trouble with her employer. I said, “Ong didn’t exactly duck out, and I’m not sure he went voluntarily.”

  She raised her eyebrows, mouth full of pastrami.

  After swearing her to secrecy, I recounted what had happened at Ong’s house.

  “Damnedest thing,” she said when I finished. “What do you suppose happened to him?”

  “I don’t know what to think. My boss theorizes that I was set up—that Ong wanted a witness to a staged disappearance. But another person connected with the case—the murder victim—also arranged something along those lines, and I’m not sure I can buy two such incidents.”

  “So maybe he was kidnapped.”

  “Maybe. But then why no ransom demands?”

  “You don’t know but what they’ve already been made. It’s not something the police or FBI would issue a press release on.”

  “True. I wish I could find out.”

  “Let’s see if I can help you.” Cheung reached for the phone cord and hauled the instrument toward her from where it sat under her desk. “I know Lionel’s secretary fairly well. I’ll call and say I need to check some facts with him for the interview piece. Even if she won’t tell me anything, I can get a feel for the situation.” She dialed, asked for Ong’s office. And waited.

  “Funny,” she said, cupping her hand over the mouthpiece. “Lynn hardly ever goes out to lunch, but they’re switching me to the message center.”

  “Leave one and see if she returns the call.”

  She did, then went back to her lunch. “So what do you plan to do?” she asked. “Go to the police?”

  “If there is a ransom demand and the authorities are called in, I’ll have to tell them what I know. But my boss has advised me to keep out of it otherwise. He’s afraid of a suit against me and the co-op if I’m wrong about what happened.”

  “Lawyers. They all ought to be shot.”

  “Sometimes I agree with you—and yet most of my good friends are lawyers.”

  “Well, some of them have their human side, and the ones at All Souls are the best of the lot. Look at Koslowski—he’s trying to save the world with his protein drink.”

  “Yes, and he’ll probably end up poisoning us all.” I finished my pickle and began to pick the sandwich apart, eating only the cheese and pastrami. “Marcy, I need to know more about Lionel Ong. The other day you mentioned a couple of mistresses, one in Sausalito and the other on Telegraph Hill. Do you know anything more about either of them?”

  “Not much. The one in Sausalito I’ve only heard rumors of—something about the two of them liking to sail together and him buying her a boat. The other I could probably find out about; I’ve got a friend who’s been to the condo and met her.”

  “Would you? I need an address, a name. A description of her, if nothing else.”

  “Sure.” She checked her watch. “He won’t be in the office now—he’s one of these fellows who’s either lunching with the mayor or sitting conspicuously at the next table to remind him he owes him a favor—but I’ll catch him later on and get back to you.”

  “Thanks.” I gave up on the sandwich and folded its wrappings around the ruins. “It amazes me how close-knit the Chinese community is; you seem to know everybody.”

  She shrugged. “We’re very interdependent; it stems from our traditional reliance on the extended family. And we’ve had to be that way: our people have taken a lot of shit in this country. Remember the Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty-two? The ‘heathen Chinee’ are the only ethnic group in history to be specifically denied entry to the U.S.”

  “I remember. But in a way don’t you think that all the discrimination helped sustain your ethnic identity? Look at me, for instance: I’m seven-eighths Scotch-Irish plus one-eighth Shoshone, and I don’t identify with any group.”

  “So what? You want to be one of those idiot liberals that even the Indians can’t stand, running around in a headdress and campaigning for Native American rights?”

  I grimaced. “No.”

  “Good, because then you’d be just another phony jerk, and I wouldn’t want to know you.”

  I smiled and sipped my beer.

  Cheung finished her sandwich and collected the debris from the floor around us. I rummaged through my bag for my cards, thinking to write my home number on the back of one for her, and encountered the scrap of paper on which I’d copied the words from the bottom of the painting in Lionel Ong’s office.

  “By the way,” I said, holding it out, “can you tell me what this means?”

  She glanced at it. “Gum San. It’s a colloquialism that roughly translates to ‘Land of the Golden Hills.’ ”

  Golden Hills. That was what both Ong and Alvin Knight had called the Stone Valley mining project. “Where is it?”

  “California as a whole. It�
�s what the Chinese who came here to work in the goldfieids back in the eighteen forties named it. Where did you run across that?”

  I described the painting on Ong’s wall.

  She nodded. “I’ve seen works like that. A couple of years ago we organized an exhibition of Chinese gold rush artifacts. The paintings were similar to our typical scrolls, except that the artists … well, most of them weren’t artists. And they had to make do with whatever materials they had on hand—the one Ong has was probably done on canvas cut from a tent.”

  I remembered the tentlike structures in the foreground of the painting, which I’d taken for pagodas. “So that was actually a picture of one of the gold camps. Where would Ong have gotten it? Are they available in galleries or antique shops?”

  “No, not too many survived. It’s probably an heirloom. When we put on the exhibition I mentioned, Lionel underwrote it pretty substantially; he said he wanted to raise public awareness of the hardships and discrimination our people suffered in the goldfields, because his grandfather’s brother died in a battle between rival tongs of Chinese miners near Weaverville in the eighteen fifties. The brother might have done the painting and sent it back to China like people send snapshots or postcards today.”

  “Then there’s more to Ong than I assumed. From the way he acts and the appearance of his home, I could have sworn he’d done his best to distance himself from his heritage. On the other hand, he’s passionate about the hardships his family has endured—attributes their success to them.”

  “I think, like most of us, Lionel has a confused sense of ethnic identity.”

  “It’s strong, though, in its way. The fact that he’s named this mining project Golden Hills—Gum San—indicates his feelings for his roots run deep. The project obviously means a lot to him—enough, perhaps, to make him go to any length to ensure it succeeds.”

  Cheung nodded, clearly disturbed by the idea, and finished gathering the remnants of her lunch. From the glance she threw at the slide-laden light table, I knew she was eager to get back to work, so I scribbled my home number on my card and told her she could call me there any time if I wasn’t available at All Souls. She said she’d be in touch as soon as she spoke with either Ong’s secretary or the friend who had been to the Transpacific condominium.

  On my way through the reception area I paused before one of the highly stylized scroll paintings. It depicted a scene similar to the one on the canvas in Ong’s office—a mountain towering over a conifer-dotted plain—but even I could tell it had been rendered by a more skilled hand. Somehow, though, the painting failed to stir me in the way Ong’s had; despite its crude workmanship, that one possessed something this lacked.

  Passion? Yes, passion. But something more. Anger?

  Yes, anger.

  Nineteen

  When I arrived at All Souls some forty minutes later, I found Ted at his desk in the once-grand foyer of the Victorian, long slender fingers skimming over his IBM keyboard. I smiled, thinking as I often did that with his fine features and neatly trimmed black goatee, he looked as if he should be composing a concerto at a grand piano rather than typing a legal document at a computer. Without glancing up or missing a beat he said, “One message in your box, and Hank asked me to tell you that he had to go out and will try to connect with you later.”

  I reached for the pink slip. A Ms. Ryder from the state Board of Registration for Geologists and Geophysicists had returned my call. “Is Rae in?”

  Ted shook his head.

  “And she hasn’t called?”

  “No.”

  “Dammit! What’s wrong with her, anyway?”

  Ted swiveled around and looked up at me. His face paled. “Jesus, what happened to you?”

  Gingerly I touched my bruised forehead. “Bad fall. I was tailing a witness on Telegraph Hill—where those steps lead down from the Coit Tower parking area, you know?—and I took a header.” It was as much of the story as I was willing to tell him.

  He looked vaguely disappointed; Ted is the co-op’s chief gatherer and dispenser of gossip, and he likes his tales as dramatic as possible. In search of richer fodder, he asked, “What’s Rae done now?”

  “Hung up on me, for one thing.”

  “What’d you do to her?”

  “Why do you always assume I’m the one at fault?”

  He shrugged, the comers of his mouth twitching in amusement. “Rae’s awfully easygoing. It would take a lot to make her hang up on anyone—particularly you. You’re her idol, you know.”

  “You mean I was her idol, until everything fell apart last summer.”

  “After the shooting?”

  “Yes, things are different between us now. She’s never said anything, but I can see it in her eyes, hear it in the tone of voice she uses sometimes.” Yours, too.

  Ted nodded and studied me, stroking his goatee; it was as if he’d heard my unspoken words. After a moment he said, “Well, that was a bad time for all of us—for a variety of reasons.” He’d lost his oldest and dearest friend to AIDS that week. “But the rest of us got over it eventually.”

  “Not Rae.”

  “No.” His gaze turned inward for a moment, as if he was examining his true feelings to verify that he’d indeed put the incident behind him. “It’s not that Rae thinks you’re a bad person, Shar. She’s just frightened.”

  “Of me?”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “What, then?”

  “Why don’t you ask her?”

  “Would she tell me?”

  “I doubt that she even realizes she’s frightened. But if you talked about it, it might force her to confront what’s really going on inside of her.”

  I shook my head in confusion. “Sometimes you can be so damned … obfuscatory!”

  “Is that a word?”

  “I don’t know. Look it up and see.” I headed upstairs to my office, message slip in hand.

  The yellow rose in the vase on my desk had wilted and browning petals dusted the corner of the blotter. As I swept them into the wastebasket, I reminded myself to call George as soon as he was due home from Stanford. Then I sat down and dialed the Sacramento number on the slip.

  Ms. Ryder was in charge of records for the Board of Registration, and she had already pulled Alvin K. Knight’s file. Mr. Knight, she told me, had been a registered geologist since 1973. In the years since then, only one complaint had been lodged against him, and it was later withdrawn.

  “What did it concern?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry. Since it was withdrawn, I’m not allowed to go into the details.”

  So why go into it at all? I wondered. “Is there any other agency or professional association that can tell me more about Mr. Knight’s credentials?”

  “Try the American Society of Consulting Geologists and Mineralogists in Berkeley.” She read me their number.

  I called Berkeley and spoke with a Mr. Hay. Unbound by the restraints of state bureaucracy, he had a good deal to say about Alvin Knight.

  “Mr. Knight dropped his membership with us five years ago,” he said, “after he was requested to appear before our board for unethical conduct—falsifying the mineral survey on a mining claim that was in the process of being patented with the Bureau of Land Management.”

  I reached toward one of my stack trays, where I’d put the file Anne-Marie had prepared for me on gold mining. “Patenting a mining claim with the BLM actually amounts to buying the land, does it not? The title passes from the government to the applicant for a nominal sum per acre, with no strings attached?”

  “That’s essentially correct. The General Accounting Office has recommended that the mining law be changed to permit claim holders to purchase only the mineral rights on the land, rather than the land itself. That was in response to a number of incidents where people bought property cheaply and then didn’t put it into mining use—a good way to acquire valuable land at very low prices. But so far nothing’s come of the proposal.”

  “An
d what are the requirements for the patenting process?”

  “The major one is that the applicant show the bureau that a valuable mineral has been discovered on the land and that the claim has been surveyed by a mineral surveyor selected from the BLM state roster.”

  “And Knight was qualified to do that?”

  “Yes. Unfortunately there was some question about the validity of his survey. A complaint was lodged with a state agency by a concerned environmentalist group that feared Mr. Knight was cooperating in a scheme to gain ownership of the land for non-mining purposes. It was later withdrawn, but we still felt it necessary to call him before the board for explanation.” Mr. Hay’s voice had taken on a gleeful undertone. I gathered that he hadn’t liked Knight—or maybe he was just the sort of person who enjoyed another’s misfortune.

  But what he had told me caused the germ of an idea to send out fragile tendrils. I asked, “So far as you know, is Mr. Knight still on the BLM surveyors’ roster?”

  “I see no reason that he would have been removed.”

  “But nevertheless he dropped his membership in your society rather than go before the board.”

  “Yes. Mr. Knight is not the sort of person who responds well to authority.”

  Since I didn’t like Mr. Hay’s smug tone, and because I also am unresponsive to authority, I found myself in sympathy with the geologist. But not in such great sympathy that I didn’t begin to peruse my file carefully as soon as I finished the call. Of particular interest to me were copies of two newspaper articles entitled “Forest Service Warns of Non-mining Use of Former Federal Lands” and “Miner Got Land Dirt Cheap.”

  At close to three I called Knight’s number and hung up as soon as the geologist answered. Then I set out to see him.

  Alvin Knight was not pleased to find me on his doorstep, but my battered appearance caught him off guard, and before he could block me, I stepped into the house. He gaped and said, “Ms. McCone, what—”

  “We need to talk. Shall we go to your office?”

  “I’m very busy—”