McCone and Friends

by Marcia Muller

Heavy footsteps came toward the door. I tensed, knife out and ready.

  Don’t think about how it’ll be when you use it, Rae. Just do it—two lives are at stake here, and one’s your own.

  The door opened. All I could see was a wide path of wavery light. Waterson said, “Fuckin’ wind,” and shut the door again. Well, hell.

  I waited a few seconds until his footsteps went away, reached for the knob again, and really yanked on it this time. The wind caught the door, slammed it back, and it smashed into me, smacking my nose. I bit my lip to keep from yelling, felt tears spring to my eyes. I wiped them away with my left hand, gripped the knife till my right hand hurt.

  The footsteps came back again, quicker now, and I grasped the knife with both hands—ready, not thinking about it, just ready to do it because I had to. When he stepped outside, I shoved the door as hard as I could with my whole body, slamming him against the frame. He shouted, staggered, reeled back inside.

  I went after him, saw him stumbling among a bunch of weird, twisted shapes that were some sort of pottery sculptures—the things that had made the strange shadows I’d glimpsed through the window. Some were as tall as he was, others were shorter or stood on pedestals. He grabbed at one and brought it down as he tried to keep his balance and raise his gun.

  The gun went off. The roar was deafening, but I hadn’t heard any whine, so his shot must have gone wide of me. Waterson stumbled back into a pedestal, flailing. I lunged at him, knife out in front of me. We both went down together. I heard the gun drop on the floor as I slashed out with the knife.

  Waterson had hold of my arm now, slammed it against the floor. Pain shot up to my shoulder, my fingers went all prickly, and I dropped the knife. He pushed me away and started scrambling for the gun. I got up on my knees, grabbed at the base of the nearest sculpture, pushed. It hit his back and knocked him flat.

  Waterson howled. I saw the gun about a foot from his hand and kicked out, sending it sliding across the floor. Then I stood all the way up, grabbed a strange many-spouted vase from a pedestal. And slammed it down on his head.

  Waterson grunted and lay still.

  I slumped against the pedestal, but only for a moment before I went to pick up the gun. The room was very quiet all of a sudden, except for sobbing coming from one corner. Adrian was trussed up there, dangling like a marionette from one of the support beams, her feet barely touching the plank floor.

  She had the beginnings of a black eye and tears sheened her face, and she was jerking at her ropes like she was having some kind of attack. I located the knife, made what I hoped were reassuring noises as I went over there, and cut her down, she stumbled toward a mattress that lay under the window and curled up fetus-like, pulling the heavy blanket around her. I went over to Waterson and used the longer pieces of rope to truss him up.

  Then I went back to Adrian. She was shivering violently, eyes unfocused, fingers gripping the edge of the blanket. I sat down on the mattress beside her, gently loosened her fingers, and cradled her like a baby.

  “Sssh,” I said. “It’s over now, all over.”

  I was lolling around All Soul’s living room on Friday night, waiting for Willie and planning how I’d relate my triumph in solving the Conway-Dalson case to him, when the call came from Inspector Adah Joslyn.

  “I just back from Marin County,” she told me “Waterson’s finally confessed to the Simoom murder, but he denies killing Kirby Dalson.”

  “Well, of course he would. Dalson was obviously premeditated, while the poker in Simoom’s hand could be taken to mean self-defense.”

  “He’ll have to hire one hell of a lawyer to mount a defense like that, given what he did to the niece. But that’s not my problem. What is it that he’s got a verifiable alibi for the time of Dalson’s death.”

  “What?”

  “Uh-huh. Dalson didn’t leave his parents’ house until six-twenty that night. Six to seven, Waterson was in a meeting with several of the Ocean Park Plaza merchants, including Adrian Conway’s former boss.”

  I remembered Sue Hanford saying Waterson had taken off the morning before Kirby was killed and hadn’t come back until six. I hadn’t thought to ask her how she knew that or if he’d stayed around afterwards. Damn! Maybe I wasn’t the hot shot I thought I was.

  Adah asked, “You got any ideas on this?”

  Unwilling to admit I didn’t, I said, “Maybe. Let me get back to you.” I hung up the phone on Ted’s desk, then took the stairs two at a time and went to Sharon’s office.

  She wasn’t there. Most of the time the woman practically lived in the office, but now when I needed her, she was gone. I went back downstairs and looked for her mailbox tag. Missing. There was one resting on the corner of the desk, like she might have been talking with Ted and absentmindedly set it down there. I hurried along the hall to the kitchen, where five people hadn’t yet given up on the Friday happy hour, but Sharon wasn’t one of them. Our resident health freak, who was mixing up a batch of cranberry-juice-and-cider cocktails, said she’d gone home an hour ago.

  I said, “If Willie shows up before I get back, will you ask him to wait for me?” and trotted out the door.

  Sharon doesn’t live far from All Souls—in Glen Park, a district that’s been undergoing what they call gentrification. I suppose you could say her brown-shingled cottage—one of the few thousand built as temporary housing after the ’06 quake that have survived far better than most of the grand mansions of that era—has been gentrified, since she’s remodeled it and added a room and a deck, but to me it’s just nice and homey, not fancy at all. Besides, things are always going wrong with it—tonight it was the porch light, shorting out from rain that had dripped into it because the gutters were overflowing. I rang the bell, hoping it wouldn’t also short out and electrocute me.

  Sharon answered wearing her long white terry robe and fur lined slippers and looking like she was coming down with a cold—probably from the soaking she’d gotten Tuesday night, which meant I would be the next one in line to get sick, from the soaking I’d gotten last night. She looked concerned when she saw me on the steps.

  Last night, after I’d dealt with the Marin authorities and driven home feeling rocky and ready to fly apart at the slightest sound or movement, she’d come over to the co-op—Ted had called her at home, I guess—and we’d sat quietly in my nest for a while. Neither of us had said much—there was nothing to say, and we didn’t need to, anyway. This second horror in a week of unpleasantness had changed me somehow, maybe forced me to grow up. I wasn’t looking to Sharon for wisdom or even comfort, just for understanding and fellowship. And fellows we were—members of a select group to which election was neither an honor nor a pleasure.

  Tonight I could tell that she was afraid I was suffering delayed repercussions from the violent events of the week, so quickly I said, “I need to run some facts by you. Got a few minutes?”

  She nodded, looking relieved, and waved me inside. We went to the sitting room off her kitchen, where she had a fire going, and she offered me some mulled wine. While she was getting it, her yellow cat, Ralph, jumped into my lap. Ralph is okay as cats go, but really, I’m more of a dog person. He knows that, too—it’s why he always makes a beeline for me when I come over. The little sadist looked at me with knowing eyes, then curled into a ball on my lap. His calico sister Alice, who was grooming herself in the middle of the floor, looked up, and damned if she didn’t wink!

  Sharon came back with the wine, wrapped herself in her afghan on the couch, and said, “So run it by me.”

  I did, concluding, “Adrian couldn’t have killed Kirby. Her hysterics when Waterson told her he was dead were genuine.”

  “Mmmm.” Sharon seemed to be evaluating that. Then she said, “Maybe one of the other kids Kirby was blackmailing?”

  “I thought of that, too, but it doesn’t wash. Adrian talked a little while we were driving to Point Reyes to call the sheriff. She said none of the kids knew about the house on Naples—Kirby insisted it
be kept a secret.”

  “What about one of the fences he dealt with? Maybe he’d crossed one of them.”

  “I tend to doubt it. Fences don’t operate that way.”

  “Well, you should know. Willie…”

  “Yeah.” I sipped wine, feeling gloomy and frustrated.

  Sharon asked, “Who else besides Adrian knew about that house?”

  “Well, Waterson, but his alibi is firm. And Aunt June. Adrian called her from a pay phone at a store on the corner the day she walked in on Kirby and Waterson making a deal with a fence, and June drove over to the city and picked her up. Adrian had told June about the trouble she was in when she and Kirby went to Tomales for the autumnal equinox firing in late September, and June’d offered to take her in after she went to security about what was going on. I don’t know how June thought Adrian could escape prosecution for her part in the scam, but then, she didn’t strike me as a terribly realistic person.”

  “Caring, though,” Sharon said. “Caring and controlling.”

  I nodded. “June, the fierce protectress. Who died with a fire place poker in her hand. Waterson had a gun, and she still tried to go up against him.”

  “And Kirby had come out to her place. Had scared Adrian.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Sharon got up, took out glasses, and went to the kitchen for refills. I stared moodily into the fire. When I’d taken this job. I’d assumed I’d be running skip traces and interviewing witnesses for lawsuits. Now I’d found two dead bodies, almost killed a man, almost gotten killed myself—all in the course of a few days. Add to that an ethical dilemma…

  When Sharon came back I said, “If I suggest this to the police, and June really was innocent, I’ll be smearing the memory of a basically good woman.”

  She was silent, framing her reply. “If June was innocent, the police won’t find any evidence. If she was guilty, they may find a weapon with blood and hair samples that match Kirby’s somewhere on the premises at Tomales, and be able to close the file.”

  “But what will that do to Adrian?”

  “From what you tell me, she’s a survivor. And you’ve got to think of Kirby’s parents. You’ve got to think of justice.”

  Leave it to Sharon to bring up the J-word. She thinks about things like that all the time, but to me they’re just abstractions.

  “And you’ve got to think about the truth,” she added.

  Not fair—and she knows how I feel about the truth. “All right,” I finally said. “I’ll call Adah back later.”

  “Good. By the way, how are Adrian and her mother doing?”

  “Well, all of this has been tough on them. Will be tough for a while. But they’ll make it. Adrian is a survivor, and Donna—maybe this will help her realized her ‘potential to be.’”

  We both smile wryly. Sharon said, “Here’s to our potential to be,” and we toasted.

  After a while I went into her home office and called Adah. Then I called All Souls and Hy, who was regaling the folks in the kitchen with stories about the days when he was on the wrong side of the law, and told him I’d be there soon.

  “So,” Sharon said as I was putting on my slicker. “How’re you holding up?”

  “I’m still rocky, but that’ll pass.”

  “Nightmares?”

  “Yeah. But tonight they won’t bother me. I plan to scare them off by sleeping with my favorite gorilla.”

  Sharon grinned and toasted me again, but damned if she didn’t look melancholy.

  Maybe she still knew something that I didn’t.

  RECYCLE

  (Hy Ripinsky)

  On their fortieth birthdays, most women want a little romance, right? Be taken out to dinner, given a present, maybe flowers. Not McCone though. She’s one of a kind. On her fortieth, she wanted me to go with her to the dump.

  Sure, I know we’re supposed to call it a refuse disposal site, but politically correct doesn’t always cut it with me. A dump’s a dump, and the proof of that is in the smell.

  The dump we’re talking about was in Sonoma County, some 45 miles north of the Golden Gate, out in the middle of farmland near the town of Los Alegres. A long blacktop road led uphill from the highway; at its top earthmovers worked on the edge of the landfill and seagulls perched on a mountain of recycled yard waste.

  “Nasty little scavengers flew twenty miles inland to feast at this fancy establishment,” I commented.

  McCone gave me look that said she wasn’t impressed with the gulls’ navigational talents, and then slammed on the brakes inches short of the bumper of a van crammed with plastic garbage bags—the last in a line of vehicles that were stopped at the gate waiting to pay the entrance fee.

  “I know, Ripinsky, I know,” she muttered, even though I hadn’t said anything. “Eyes front.” Then she steered her MG around the van and took a side road toward the recycling sheds—a row of board shacks surrounded by busted furniture and rusted appliances, were a hand lettered sign advertised:

  RECYCLED MERCHANDISE!

  LOW PRICES!

  HOUSEWARES, BOOKS, CLOTHING AND MORE!

  Books? The morning was looking better. Maybe while she did her business I’d lay hand to an old western for my collection.

  We’d come north from San Francisco on a lead one of McCone’s operatives had turned up, to hunt for a man calling himself Nick Galway. Not his real name, she had good reason to believe he was really the well known sculptor, Glenn Farrell. Ten years ago Farrell had disappeared from his farm in Vermont, leaving behind his wife and child and taking with him the gold for three pieces of sculpture commissioned by a wealthy client who invested in precious metals and wanted some of his holding put to aesthetic use. Recently a friend of the client had spotted Farrell in northern California, and the client hired McCone to find him and either take back the gold or turn Farrell over to the authorities.

  It was odds even that Galway/Farrell still had the gold. At least if you took into account the condition of the caretaker’s cottage he rented on a small ranch west of Los Alegres, where we’d stopped earlier. It was sagging and in bad repair, overgrown by ivy and surrounded by weeds and a collection of junk—not the sort of place anybody with the wherewithal to live the good life would’ve chosen. When nobody came to the door, we drove up to the main house and McCone spoke with landlady, who identified Glenn Farrell’s photo as her tenant. She said he was probably scavenging at the dump, as he did most mornings.

  Now as we got out of McCone’s MG, a dark-haired woman with a weather-beaten face and a grimy t-shirt came from the first of the sheds, carrying something that looked like part of a plane’s prop. She saw us, did an about-face, and tossed the thing into a refuse barrel. Then she came over and asked, “Help you?”

  McCone said, “I’m looking for Nick Galway. His landlady told me he’d probably be here.”

  She gave us an odd look, as if she couldn’t imagine anybody wanting Galway. “Haven’t seen him today. You a friend of his?”

  “A friend of a friend asked me to look him up.”

  “Why? The lunatic owe him money or something?”

  “Lunatic?”

  “Well, what else would call a guy spends half his life scrounging for dirt-cheap stuff?”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “Anything. Everything. So long’s it’s cheap.”

  “What does he do with it?”

  “Claims to be a sculptor. Says he used to be famous under another name. Made expensive art for rich folks, but now his art’s in the junk. Weird way of putting it, huh?”

  “Well, artist…”

  “Yeah, artist. Comes around nearly every day, yaps at me the whole time. Nonsense about running away from crass commercialism and middle-class values. Guess he’s lonely and tryin’ to impress me, but he talks so crazy I mostly don’t listen.”

  “Well, if he comes in today, will you give me a call?” the woman nodded and McCone wrote her cell phone number on a scrap of paper, wrapped a twenty around it.
“But don’t tell him somebody’s looking for him, okay?”

  The dump lady grinned at the twenty. “He comes in, you’ll hear from me.”

  In case Galway had turned up at home, McCone decided to check the ranch again, but nobody answered her knocks at the door of the cottage. She was just trying the knob—and finding it unlocked—when an old sedan pulled up next to where I was sitting in the MG, and I recognized the white-haired Mrs. Mallory, the landlady. She leaned out her window and asked me, “You didn’t find Nick at the dump?”

  “No, ma’am,” I glanced at McCone. She’d turned away from the door, had her hands clasped innocently behind her. “The woman who runs the recycle shop says he hasn’t been there today.”

  “Strange.” She shut off her engine and got out of the car, spry and slim in her work shirt, jeans, and mud-splattered boots—the kind of tough old bird that a lifetime of ranching breeds. She reminded me of my dead mother.

  Shaking her key ring, she isolated one and called McCone, “We better check inside, Nick never stays away this long unless he’s at the dump or—”

  “The door’s not locked,” McCone said, and stepped inside.

  I got out of the MG and followed at a distance. The case was McCone’s, and I knew from long and sometimes hellacious experience to maintain a hands-off attitude.

  The cottage was pretty dingy inside: matted pea-green shag carpet, dark scarred paneling, furniture that belonged at the dump—and had probably come from there. Mrs. Mallory went through the place calling out for Galway, while McCone followed close on her heels and I cooled mine in the front room. They came back, Mrs. Mallory shaking her head. “Not here. Worries me.”

  McCone asked, “Can you think of anyplace else he might’ve gone?”

  “Did you check his studio?”

  “I didn’t know he had one. Where is it?”

  “The barn. It’s not used anymore, so I let him have it.”

  “So he’s still sculpting?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t call it that. Don’t know what I would call it. Maybe putting together atrocities. Huge, horrible things that’re a mishmash of what he drags home from the dump. Let’s see if he’s there.”