by Janet Dawson
He fingered the little gold pin that anchored his understated maroon-and-navy tie. “I don’t remember her. I’m three years older than my brother. By the time he graduated, I’d finished my junior year at U.C.”
“Did you live at home? Or in Berkeley?”
“I had an apartment near campus,” he said before he had a chance to wonder why I was asking. “Say, what’s this about anyway?”
“Your brother Emory. I’m trying to locate him.”
“Why?” When I didn’t elaborate, Stuart decided to fill the silence. “He’s a stagehand. Has been ever since he dropped out of college. He works at theaters all over the Bay Area. Right now he’s at the Paramount, until the end of the ballet season. Have you tried there?”
“It’s early for the theater. I understand he lives with you.”
Stuart shook his head, but he spoke, evidently deciding to be helpful. “With me? No, no. Well, he has a key to my place. He stays with me when he’s working at the Golden Gate or the Orpheum. So he’s back and forth. And he lived with me earlier this fall, for a month or so. They were doing something to his apartment over in Oakland, like replacing the carpet or painting.”
“When was that?”
“October, November. I don’t remember when. Just that it was before Thanksgiving. Say, what is this all about anyway?”
“I told you it was about Maureen Smith. I’m surprised you don’t remember her. From what I hear, she, Kara Jenner, and your brother were inseparable.”
Stuart frowned again and the helpful tone left his voice. “And I told you that I was in college when my brother was in high school. I had my own life. I didn’t pay any attention to Emory’s friends.”
“You’re dating one of Emory’s friends.”
“Kara and I connected later, when she started school at Cal.”
He was lying. Amanda told me last night that Stuart and Kara had dated while Kara was in high school. I looked at Stuart as though I didn’t believe him. He picked up on my skepticism. Now he was getting irritated.
“Look, I really have to get back to work,” he said, moving toward the door he’d come through earlier. “If you want to find my brother, you’ll have to try his place in Oakland, or the theater.” He turned, ready to escape back to his cubicle.
“Maureen’s dead. Did you know that?” I watched his face for some indication that he was aware of Maureen’s death, but I didn’t see it. Surprise, yes. And something else I couldn’t put my finger on. Could it be relief? If it was, I wanted to know why.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Stuart said it as if by rote. He didn’t ask how or when she had died. “If you’ll excuse me.”
When I stepped outside onto Montgomery Street, I headed for the offices of Cavagnaro Industries on Kearny Street, to see if the woman I’d spoken with on the phone had any luck locating a forwarding address for the Keltons, who used to own the lot where Maureen’s body had been found. I walked the few blocks up Post and took the elevator to the sixth floor of the building where the developer was located. It was a more utilitarian work space than the accounting firm I’d just left.
“Is Jenny here?” I asked.
“No,” the woman at the front desk said. “She took the week off. Can I help you?”
I explained my errand, not at all hopeful of getting any information. But the woman nodded. “I know she was working on that,” the other woman said. She remembered me from my first visit. “Let me take a look.” She disappeared into the file room. It took her a few minutes, but she finally came out carrying a file folder. “Here it is,” she said. “She got in touch with the real estate broker who handled the transaction.” I sighed, since I’d already done that. “At the time the Keltons sold their property, their return address was a post office box in Piedmont.”
“That’s not much help as far as locating them.” From past experience I knew that getting information from the U.S. Postal Service was somewhat more difficult than prying open a giant clam.
The woman sifted through the papers in the folder. “I know we must have sent some papers to them overnight mail. If we used Express Mail, it would have gone to the P.O. box. But Federal Express has to have an address.” Her fingers moved and I saw the familiar FedEx logo on a receipt and felt an accompanying surge of relief. “Here it is. San Carlos Avenue in Piedmont. And there’s a phone number.”
Paydirt, I thought as I wrote down the information on a slip of paper the woman provided. I could go back to my office and consult my crisscross directory to find out who lived at that address and phone number now. Then maybe I could locate the Keltons.
I left Cavagnaro Industries and walked back down to Market Street. Now I was closer to the Powell Street BART station, destination of all those Christmas shoppers because of its proximity to Union Square. I took the steps down the nearest BART entrance to the tunnels underneath. I heard the distinctive buzz of the San Francisco Metro Muni streetcar moving through the first level as I took the escalator down to the second level, where the BART trains stopped to pick up passengers for the East Bay or the western reaches of San Francisco and Daly City.
The platform was packed with people, many of them burdened with shopping bags and packages. Some sat on benches, reading the early afternoon edition of the Examiner, while others listened to small radios with headphones, the thin wires stretching across their bodies like tendrils of ivy.
I sidestepped two women in business suits and sneakers. Both of them carried briefcases, one of which smacked me in the rear end. The destination signs overhead flashed the message indicating that an East Bay train was due to arrive in two minutes. My chances of getting a seat or at least more space to stand were better in one of the front cars, so I made my way along the platform, jostling and being jostled.
Now away from the bulk of the crowd, I walked to the edge of the platform and looked down at the rail bed, noting the signs that warned workers to stay away from the electric third rail. As always, I looked for the mice who lived down on the floor of the tunnel. I spotted two of the little creatures darting along the crevasse where the wall of the station joined the concrete floor. I glanced to my right and saw the bright single headlamp of the approaching BART train, moving this way through the tunnel from Civic Center to Powell. The train pushed a whoosh of air ahead of it.
I felt the hand in the middle of my back a split second before it shoved me hard. I flew out and down like some awkward bird, and with a bone-jarring thud landed on my left side in the grimy concrete channel between the rails. I heard a collective gasp from the shoppers above me on the platform as I scrambled to my feet, feeling a pain in my left knee, elbow, and ankle, and a stinging sensation on the palm of my left hand where I’d scraped the skin. The sour taste of fear invaded my mouth. Everything seemed to slow to a crawl.
Everything except the silver BART train rocketing toward me.
Forty-one
I MADE A RUNNING LEAP FOR THE PLATFORM EDGE and grabbed a pair of outstretched hands. Other hands seized my arms, legs, clothes, hauling me up. My rescuers and I tumbled back into a heap on the platform as the train rushed by and braked to a stop a few yards beyond.
I thanked the people who had pulled me up onto the platform. That first pair of hands belonged to a big balding man in work clothes. He was assisted by two teenage boys and a white-faced young woman who kept a death grip on my arm as we slowly got to our feet. A cacophony of questions hurtled my way, people wanting to know what happened, if I was hurt.
“I’m fine,” I said, taking inventory. Various body parts ached and my heart was pounding, but I didn’t seem to be seriously injured. My clothes were smudged from the filth on the concrete floor. My purse was still down in the channel under the train.
Now the train operator pushed through the crowd toward me. She was followed by two plainclothes BART cops who’d been riding the train. More BART cops appeared from the station above. Finally the train loaded its passengers and one of the cops retrieved my purse. Then they escor
ted me upstairs to an office.
“It was an accident,” I told them repeatedly. No, I wasn’t trying to kill myself by jumping in front of the train. I knew that several people had, over the years. But not me. They asked me if I wanted to see a doctor. I kept assuring them I was fine. I was neither drunk nor stoned. It must have been the press of the crowd. I’d misjudged the edge of the platform.
I didn’t say anything about feeling a hand in the middle of my back. I didn’t want to deal with the questions that would result from that little bombshell. I’d certainly rattled someone’s cage. I wondered who. Stuart Marland, perhaps? Had he followed me after I’d left his office? Or was it someone else who didn’t like all the questions I’d been asking about Maureen Smith?
Finally they let me wash the grease and dirt from my hands and I was allowed to leave. I limped back downstairs and caught the next East Bay train, as wary as Black Bart, keeping distance between me and my fellow passengers. At City Center in Oakland, I exited the station and walked slowly to my Franklin Street office, favoring my left leg.
Cassie had just stepped off the elevator into the lobby, arm in arm with Eric. “What happened?” she demanded when she saw me.
“Someone pushed me in front of a BART train.”
“Good lord, Jeri.” She and Eric each took an arm and pointed me toward the elevator. On the third floor she dug out my keys and opened the door to my office. They sat me in the chair in front of my desk. Eric knelt and untied my shoe. Gingerly he removed it and the woolly sock I wore. The ankle twinged a bit but I could move it without much pain. I pulled up the cuff of my slacks. The knee looked worse. It was red and swollen. In fact, it seemed to hurt me more now that I wasn’t moving.
“You’d better put some ice on it, to take that swelling down. I’ll be right back.” Cassie headed next door to Alwin, Taylor, and Chao. She returned a moment later with a towel, a plastic bag of ice from the law office’s refrigerator, and an Ace bandage. I opened a desk drawer and took out a bottle of painkillers, quickly reading the label to see how many I could safely take. Cassie got me a glass of water from the cooler out in the hallway and I swallowed a couple of the tablets, then stuck the bottle into my purse.
“You should get X rays, to see if anything’s broken,” Eric said.
“Nothing’s broken. I just landed hard, that’s all.” I held the ice pack to my knee and shivered at the chill.
“Well, at the very least, you should go home and put your feet up.”
“Thanks for being concerned, but I can’t. Too much to do.”
Eric started to dispute this, but Cassie took his arm and pulled him toward the door. “She’s impossible,” she told him. “You can’t argue with her.” She turned back to me. “Just keep that ice on it a little while longer before you go out romping and stomping. I’ll call you tonight.”
When they’d gone, I got to my feet and hobbled over to the other side of my desk, sitting down heavily in my office chair. I pulled out a desk drawer and propped my foot up awkwardly, placing the ice pack on top of the ankle. It hurt, but I hated inactivity worse. I shifted in my chair until I could reach the bookshelf behind me. I pulled out the phone book for the Oakland-Berkeley area and the crisscross directory.
The Piedmont address and phone number on San Carlos Avenue, where the Kelton family had stayed after their home had been destroyed in the Oakland fire, belonged to someone named Van Alt. I picked up the phone and punched in the number. This netted me an answering device advising that no one was available to take my call. I disconnected without leaving a message.
The phone directory had several listings for the last name Marland. None of them had a Piedmont exchange, but there was an E.A. Marland in Berkeley and an E. Marland in Oakland. The Berkeley address was in the hills, homes too large and expensive for Emory Marland, a college dropout who worked as a stagehand at various Bay Area theaters. The Oakland address was on Seventeenth Street between Jackson and Madison, just a block this side of Lake Merritt and a ten-minute walk from the Paramount.
Or my office. I put aside the towel and the ice and took the Ace bandage from its package, wrapping it snugly around my knee. I put my sock on over my tender ankle. As I put on my shoe, I was glad to see that my foot wasn’t swollen. In the time it took me to walk to the lot where I kept my car, I decided I felt better while I was moving. But I didn’t want to push it by walking the few blocks from Franklin Street to the lake. I drove to Emory Marland’s building instead. As I circled the block looking for a spot to park my car, I cursed the incident that had slowed me down. Finally I saw a car pulling away from the curb on Madison and snagged the resulting parking place.
The three-story stucco apartment building on Seventeenth looked as though it had been built in the thirties and hadn’t received much in the way of regular maintenance since. The exterior was a dirty beige. As I stood on the sidewalk, looking up the concrete steps at the front door, I noticed cracks here and there in the stucco, probably a legacy of the Loma Prieta earthquake several years ago. A tattered brown awning hung over the building’s stoop. As I mounted the steps, the awning’s torn edges blew in the chill wind.
Ostensibly this was a security building, but the last person out hadn’t bothered to make sure the door had closed all the way. There was an “Apartment for Rent” sign taped to the glass pane. Once inside, I checked the bank of mailboxes immediately to my right and found a label reading, “E. Marland, 308.”
The flocked wallpaper in the central hallway had once been red and white. Time and neglect had dulled it to magenta and dirty cream. The carpet may have been the same color, but the tread of hundreds of feet had obliterated the nap as well as the hue. The general color scheme made the place look like a whorehouse gone to seed.
I wrinkled my nose. I guessed that musty smell was the carpet. Midway down the hall I saw an elevator door and the stairs. I was nervous about taking the elevator, particularly if it had been maintained with the same level of disinterest as the rest of the building. But with my knee hurting the way it did, I didn’t think I could handle the stairs. I pushed the button and the door opened. I stepped into the car and hit the button for the third floor. With great creaking groans the car rose to its destination.
On the third floor I found unit 308, the last door on the right, at the rear of the building next to the exit sign and the back stairs. I knocked. No response.
The building was quiet, not unusual since it was the middle of the day. I heard a clank and a whir as the elevator came into service. It labored downward and stopped, then came up again, to the third floor. An elderly woman got out, moving slowly, as though both she and the elevator shared the aches and pains of age. She carried a small plastic shopping bag and one end of a leash. The other end of the leash was attached to the collar of an equally geriatric poodle.
The old woman looked startled to see me, perhaps even a bit frightened to find a stranger in the hallway. “Hi,” I said with a reassuring smile. “I’m looking for Emory Marland. He lives in 308.”
“Don’t know him,” she said, heading for a unit at the front, her keys in her hand. The poodle woofed at me and waddled in her wake.
For all I knew, the E. Marland on the mailbox could be Emily and not Emory. But I had a hunch. I went back downstairs. As I’d entered the building foyer, the first door on my right had a sign reading “Manager, T. Gupta.” Behind the door I heard talk and laughter from a television set. I knocked. The volume lessened, then the door was pulled open by a woman in a sari. She was in her forties, I guessed, with streaks of gray in black hair gathered into a knot at the nape of her neck.
“Yes?” she said in a musical voice. “You wish to inquire about the apartment?”
I shook my head. “It’s about your tenant in 308.”
“Emory?” she said, confirming E. Marland’s identity. “Is there a problem?”
I looked her over, wondering how much to tell her. “I’m doing a background check on Emory Marland,” I said, not saying w
hy and hoping she wouldn’t ask. “How long has he lived here? Has he always paid his rent on time?”
She folded her arms and thought for a moment, as though she were mentally sifting through file folders. “He’s been here about a year. He moved in last January. I haven’t had any problems with him.”
“I understand he’s employed at the Paramount Theatre.”
“Something backstage. I think he works at other theaters too.”
That made sense. There were times when the theater was dark. Being a stagehand couldn’t be all that steady. I was itching to get a look at whatever files she had on Emory, but from the way she stood in the hall with one hand on the apartment door, I doubted I’d get a crack at any tenant information.
“So he pays his rent on time. Have you had any complaints about him from other tenants? Noise, anything like that?”
She shook her head. “He’s quiet, keeps to himself. I think he’s gone a lot. What is this about?”
I took the photograph of Maureen from my purse. “Have you ever seen Emory with this woman?”
Ms. Gupta barely glanced at the snapshot. “I don’t pry into the lives of my tenants.”
“It’s important,” I told her.
She relented and took the picture from me, examining Maureen’s face. Then she shook her head again. “Sorry, I don’t recognize her. I don’t see Emory with girls. Or boys. He’s really a loner. Hardly speaks to anyone. Sometimes I don’t see him days at a time.”
I tucked the photo back in my purse. “Sometimes he stays with his brother in San Francisco,” I said. “Like when his carpet was being replaced.”
“Carpet?” Ms. Gupta frowned. “I know nothing about carpet being replaced. Surely the owner would have said something to me.”
“You’re certain of that?”
“Replacing carpet is a big job. Also expensive. Mr. Fry, the owner of this building, he is not an extravagant man. As you can see.” She gestured at the dingy hallway. “If you were moving into this building, the best you could hope for is that the carpet might be cleaned and the paint on the walls touched up. But new carpet? Oh, no. Besides, I would have noticed. After all, they must come in this door.” She pointed at the main entrance, just to her left. “Workmen, rolls of carpet. I saw nothing like this.”
