While Other People Sleep

by Marcia Muller

  “When you read those fact sheets, you'll see it's obvious that the person's been watching us, following Neal, waiting for the opportunity to harm him. So I started watching our building and following Neal, too. After all, I work for an investigative agency. Even though I'm only the office manager, I should've been able to find out who it was—right?” He shook his head. “Wrong. I didn't accomplish anything except using up a lot of gas and time and working myself into a weird state, which you all paid the price for. Neal, too.” His lips twisted wryly. “Poor guy: for his birthday three weeks ago I gave him a series of karate lessons, thinking that they'd at least make him more fit to defend himself. He hated the first two lessons.”

  I looked around at the others; they saw no humor in the situation. Rae was furiously scribbling notes on the back of the fact sheet. Charlotte's and Mick's expressions had grown increasingly grim.

  “Anyway,” Ted went on, “after a week and a half of notes, a phone call came. Luckily, I picked up, and the guy thought I was Neal. He said, ‘Don't go to the cops or tell that private eye your faggot boyfriend works for about me, or somebody's gonna die.’ Sounds melodramatic, I know, but something in his voice convinced me he meant it.”

  Mick asked, “Anything familiar about his voice?”

  “No, it was muffled, obviously disguised.”

  “But definitely male?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Somebody you know, maybe?”

  “Maybe.”

  Rae looked up from her notes. “At that point, why didn't you just tell Neal what was going on?”

  “Because by then I was in too deep. I'd hidden things from him, lied; I was afraid it would permanently damage our relationship if he found out. I did think about going to the police, but crimes involving gays always seem to be assigned low priority. A couple of times I came close to telling-Shar, but I just couldn't make myself do it.”

  Rae nodded. “Were there more phone calls?”

  “Almost every night, after Neal got home from the store. I took to hovering around the phone, snatching it up as soon as it rang. When I had to go out and he was there alone, I'd unplug the thing. The situation kept getting worse: somebody tried to run Neal down in front of the bookstore; a disgusting Valentine's Day gift showed up in our apartment. So I called a guy I'd met a while back and bought an unregistered handgun off him. And busted a glass door firing at somebody who climbed onto our balcony Saturday night. Neal was freaked that I had the gun and called Shar. I panicked, thinking that the guy who'd been outside might see her arrive and carry out his death threat. And then it came out that Neal had asked Shar to look into my weird behavior nearly two weeks ago.” He laughed mirthlessly. “She's been following me while I've been following Neal, who's being followed by—”

  “Hey, Ted,” I said, “it's okay.”

  He shook his head, rubbing his hands over his face. “Now that I'm talking about it, it all seems so surreal.”

  Rae quickly steered the conversation back to a businesslike level. “So what's the status on the situation now?”

  When Ted didn't answer, I replied, “Not very good, I'm afraid. Saturday night, Ted told both Neal and me to leave the apartment. He thought if we were together no harm would come to either of us, it turns out. But on Sunday morning Neal took off to think things over, and nobody knows where he went. Then yesterday evening the guy called Ted, said he knew where Neal was, and he bet he could get to him first.”

  Ted said, “I'd been calling around to friends and acquaintances all day, trying to locate him, but I'd gotten nowhere. I didn't know whether to believe the guy or not, but I was convinced the situation had turned critical. So I decided to finally confide in Shar, ask for her help. When I did, she called the police and had them put out a pickup order on Neal, so he could be taken into protective custody. And we decided to bring you three in on both our problems right away.”

  Rae exclaimed, “Jesus, Ted, you should've come to all of us right away! Or at least before you went and bought a handgun.”

  “I know, but at first I thought I could handle the situation. And later I was too ashamed.”

  “Ashamed?”

  “Yeah, because I'd messed up so badly. Because I couldn't handle it.”

  “Well, you silly faggot!”

  For a moment everybody in the room tensed as Rae and Ted locked eyes. Then, simultaneously, the two of them burst out laughing. Ted gave her the finger. She responded in kind. Old buddies who, at All Souls, had regularly shared popcorn and beer and late-night movies on TV, were mending fence in their own peculiar fashion.

  Mick asked, “So how do we proceed? Are the police investigating this?”

  “In a way,” I said.

  “Which means we'd better get on it.”

  “Yes. I'm going to head up the investigation, but I'm putting the entire agency on it as well. After we talk about my problem, I want to hold a brainstorming session to develop a strategy on how to nail this scumbag. Any questions?”

  “Yeah,” Mick said, “what is your problem?”

  “I'm being stalked and impersonated. I also couldn't bring myself to tell anybody about the situation, except to ask a few legal questions of Hank and talk with the police. My reason was similar to Ted's: I was ashamed I couldn't handle it by myself. Tough private investigator, got a reputation to live up to. Couldn't ask for help, not me.”

  Questions flew, and I answered them while Ted passed out the fact sheets on my situation. By the time everybody had skimmed them they were coming up with various strategies, none of which fit my plan.

  “Hold on,” I said. “Here's what I want to do: First we work on Ted's problem, combine resources to wrap that up. Then I intend to take a leave of absence from running the agency; I'll turn day-to-day operations over to Rae and put all my time and energy into identifying and nailing my own scumbag.”

  “Wait a cotton-pickin’ minute!” Keim exclaimed. “We go full tilt after whoever's bothering Neal, but you go it alone?”

  “Not exactly. But we can't afford to stop servicing our regular clients, or to turn down new ones. The woman's trying to ruin me personally; let's not allow her to bring the agency down as well. I'll bring all of you in on it whenever I need you, and I'll keep you posted, but the actual field investigation will be done by me.”

  I paused, looking at each of them in turn. “I want this woman bad. She's all mine.”

  During our brainstorming session we decided that Ted and Neal's building was the logical place to start our investigation. We'd talk to the other tenants, ask if any of them had seen a suspicious person or witnessed any unusual activity. And also examine their responses and the subtexts of our conversations, in case one of them was the perpetrator. Ted said that we ought to get permission from the building manager, Mona Woods, so I called for an appointment with her and, a couple of hours later, set off for Plum Alley.

  According to Ted, Mona Woods was in her late seventies, but if so, she was living testimony to age often being a matter of mind-set; when I met her at three that afternoon, she'd just returned from swimming laps at her health club. She looked me over with lively curiosity as we settled into chairs in her comfortable living room.

  “So you're the woman Ted works for,” she said. “He speaks of you fondly—and often. This business with Neal that you explained on the phone is very distressing. How can I help?”

  “First I'd like to ask you a few questions about the building. I looked at the mailboxes when I arrived. It would be difficult to slip anything inside without a key. Does anyone besides you have duplicates?”

  “No one that I know of.”

  “What about duplicate keys to the apartments?”

  She shook her head.

  “Let's talk about the tenants. Ted says one may be gay.”

  “Well, there's a lesbian couple. But Ted and Neal are the first openly gay couple to move into the building in the six years I've been manager. The other tenants are three single men, two single women, thr
ee married couples. I don't know much about them personally.”

  “Have any of them exhibited signs of homophobia?”

  Mrs. Woods thought, pursing her lips. “Well, it's not a prejudice one openly displays to an acquaintance. Not in this city. People here are often not what they seem.”

  And that didn't apply only to matters of sexual orientation. “I'd like to ask your permission for my staff and me to question the tenants. If one of them is the person who's threatening Neal, our presence here may force his hand.”

  “Certainly. Of course, it's up to them as to whether they agree to talk with you.” She gave me a list of tenants and showed me to the door, pausing there, her face grim. “You know,” she said, “we San Franciscans pride ourselves on being such a tolerant people, but that's not really true.”

  She was correct. All you have to do is drive around the city and you see dozens of pockets of self-interest. The gays in the Castro, the Chinese and Russians in the Richmond, the wealthy in Pacific Heights, the blacks in Hunters Point, the Catholics in their various dioceses, the Vietnamese in the Tenderloin. And then there are the homeless, the developers, the cults, even the bicyclers, for God's sake. Nothing wrong with healthy self-interest; it's how we make a better world for ourselves and our children. But when it starts to infringe upon others’ rights, the structure of a society begins to crumble.

  One of my biggest fears is that it's crumbling already, right here and now.

  With such cheerful thoughts on my mind, I met with my staff in the conference room at five o'clock, and we split up the list of tenants. I would take the lesbian couple and the single men; Rae would take the single women and one of the couples; and together, because Mick had little interviewing experience, he and Charlotte would take the remaining married couples. The interviews, barring complications, were to be completed by this time tomorrow. In the meantime I'd asked RKI to put a security guard on Ted's apartment.

  After the others went their respective ways, I remained at the table in the gathering gloom for a while. Instead of depressing me, the encroaching darkness had an intoxicating effect, and as night became total I felt a rush of pleasure that was almost sexual. With any luck, I'd soon be free to move through the city in search of the woman who was stealing my identity piece by piece.

  I'd soon be free to take back my life.

  Tuesday night

  Neal and Ted?” Karen Cooper said. “They're nice guys. We don't socialize all that much, but they've helped us out now and then—stuff like feeding the cat and watering the plants when we're on vacation.”

  “People in this building respect each other's privacy,” her partner, Jane Naylor, added, “but everybody's pleasant. I can't imagine one of the tenants threatening Neal like that.”

  “Does anyone in the building strike you as homophobic?”

  The women looked at each other, then shrugged. Cooper said, “Nobody's treated us any differently because we're lesbians.”

  “When you get right down to it,” Naylor said, “we're pretty congenial, considering what a mixed bag we are. Karen and I are lucky to have gotten an apartment here.”

  I hoped when this was over Ted and Neal could continue to share in their feelings of good fortune.

  “Neal's good people,” George Chu told me. He leaned against the wall in the hallway outside his apartment, still sweating from an evening run.

  “Well, somebody doesn't think so. Are you sure you haven't noticed anything, such as one of the other tenants making derogatory comments about him?”

  “No, and if I had, I'd've told them what they could do with their comments. Anybody who messes with either of them is gonna have to mess with me first.”

  Chu's toughness and protectiveness toward Ted and Neal seemed put on, for someone who earlier had admitted to only a nodding acquaintance. Was it a cover-up?

  Miles Furth was in his eighties and walked with a carved wooden cane topped by a brass eagle's head. “I'm not comfortable with homosexuality, and I don't like the lifestyle,” he told me, “but they've got as much right to be what they are as I do to be a cantankerous old geezer. If I catch whoever's doing this to Mr. Osborn—you see this cane?” He waved it.

  I nodded.

  “If I catch whoever it is, young lady, the eagle will have landed—on his head!”

  “One of the tenants? No way,” Norman Katz said. “I'm gay, and nobody's bothered me.”

  “I notice you live alone. Perhaps whoever it is isn't aware of your sexual orientation.”

  “Well, I don't post a sign on the door with a picture of a woman in a circle with a line through it, but I don't smuggle my dates up the fire escape, either.”

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “Four months.”

  “Whoever's harassing Neal may not have turned his attention to you yet.”

  “Now, there's a cheerful thought.”

  I handed him my card. “If anybody bothers you, give us a call.”

  I couldn't have been sleeping very deeply, because it was the unnatural silence in my house, rather than a noise, that woke me. The forced-air heat, which I'd turned up when I came home, no longer hummed. The ailing refrigerator no longer ticked. I'd started the dishwasher before going to bed, but it wasn't sloshing and pulsing. I pushed up on one elbow, looked at the clock. No red digital numbers gleaming in the darkness.

  Power outage or … ?

  I sat up, parted the mini-blinds above the bed with two fingers. Lights showed in the Halls’ house next door. I looked through the bedroom door to the window facing the Curley house on the other side; a small mist-diffused spot shone down on the footpath beside it. The entire street was on the same power grid; when my electricity went out, so did everybody else's.

  Reaching for my robe, I slipped out of bed. Put the .357 that lay on the nightstand into one pocket and went to get a flashlight. As an afterthought I took my house keys from where I'd dumped them on the kitchen table; no sense in leaving the house unlocked while I went outside.

  When I stepped onto the backyard deck, the mist was so thick I could barely see beyond the railing. That could be either an advantage or a disadvantage. I shut the door quietly, stood watching and listening. Nothing moved, and all I heard was a dog barking in the distance. Finally I felt my way across the deck to the stairs and down them. At their foot I ducked under the deck and moved across the uneven ground from support post to support post, stubbing my bare toe once on the stack of firewood against the house's wall and narrowly avoiding piercing the sole of my foot on a rake I'd left there. Finally I reached the opposite corner, around which the gas meter and electrical panel were located.

  There I stopped, feeling a presence. The woman could be hiding in the backyard, but more likely she was in the alley between the house and the fence. Mist was trapped there; all I could make out was the diffused glow of the Curleys’ spot-light. If I ventured around the corner to the utilities hookups, I'd be placing myself at risk.

  So flush her out.

  I glanced over at the fence, beyond which the Curleys’ German shepherds slept in their dog run. Felt my way back along the wall to where I kept a collection of empty terra-cotta flowerpots. I located a medium-sized one, carried it back to the corner of the house, and heaved it over the fence.

  Smash! And all hell broke loose. Growling and bellowing and snarling as the shepherds were up and alert to protect their territory. Within fifteen seconds a window opened and Will Curley, an early-rising trucker who cherished his sleeping time, shouted, “Shut up, you noisy buggers!” The dogs continued to bark, but in spite of them I heard footsteps running down my alley toward the front sidewalk.

  I was around the corner immediately, running after her. I couldn't see her, but I heard her feet pounding on the pavement. The sound of our combined footsteps set other neighborhood dogs to barking. Lights flashed on in the house across from me. And then her footsteps stopped and a car door slammed somewhere down the block.

  I paused, waiting fo
r its engine to start. Nothing. My neighbor was out on his front porch now. I called softly, “It's okay.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes.” I surveyed the cars parked along the street. She was hiding in one of them—

  Roar of an engine starting, and then a car near the Church Street end of the block shot out of a space and around the corner. Dark-colored, possibly a Japanese model, no light over the license plate.

  “Dammit!” I exclaimed, saw my neighbor was looking alarmed. “A prowler,” I told him. “Won't be back.”

  He nodded as if he only half believed me and went back into his house.

  I retreated into the alley, took out the flashlight, and shone it on the utilities hookup; the cover of the electrical panel was gone, propped against the foundation. The main switch had been pulled to off.

  I yanked the switch to on, decided to leave reattaching the cover till morning, and went inside. The heat hummed once again; the fridge ticked; the dishwasher sloshed and pulsed. In the bedroom the digital clock's red numbers flashed 12:17 A.M.

  She'd been so close, only yards away while I slept, and now she was gone, her night's mission fulfilled. She'd probably go home and sleep soundly, while I wouldn't close my eyes till exhaustion overtook me around dawn.

  I went into the living room and huddled on the couch, watching the dying embers of the fire I'd made earlier. After midnight, close to five in the morning in South America. Where was Hy, and what was he doing? Was he thinking of me?

  Our connection was dead, short-circuited by our separate crises. I'd felt alone many times in my life, but never as alone as this.

  Wednesday

  Charlotte and Mick had found two of the married male tenants at the Plum Alley building somewhat suspect, and I added George Chu's name to the list. Then I asked my nephew to run background checks on all three. After dealing with some routine correspondence, I called Mona Woods for another appointment and set off for Tel Hill to do more digging.