Paper Phoenix: A Mystery of San Francisco in the '70s (A Classic Cozy--with Romance!) (6 page)

“Leave her alone, Curly,” Susanna said without noticeable effect. Then, addressing the older of the two children, “Abner, take Curly out back, would you please?” As Abner, whom I guessed to be around four, corralled the dog, I noticed that the smaller boy, about two, had taken the opportunity to begin writing on the wall with a red crayon. From the look of the wall, it wasn’t the first time he had tried it. It took Susanna several minutes of persuasion mixed with threats before he was dispatched to play with his brother in the backyard. “Zeke is an individualist, but Abner can handle him for a minute,” Susanna said. “Now let’s see. Where was the folder I had for you?”

A coffee table in front of the couch was spread with papers, and a cardboard box filled with what appeared to be manuscripts was in the middle of the toy-strewn floor. On an end table I noticed a manila folder. Sitting on top of it was an open jar of peanut butter and a sticky knife. “Is that it?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah.” Susanna picked up knife and jar and handed the folder to me. “Hope you don’t mind a little peanut butter.”

“Not at all.” I opened the folder and glanced at its contents. A reprint from
Newsweek
with a photo of Larry posed against the San Francisco skyline, a Xerox from the
Los Angeles Times.
“This will be a big help.”

“I hope so.” She sat on the arm of a chair. “The only thing is, I hope you don’t want to interview me or anything.”

I shook my head. “That won’t be necessary.”

“Good,” she said. “See, I know what can happen. People say one thing, but it comes out sounding another way.”

“You won’t have to worry about that.” I felt sorry for her. She looked so fragile, blue veins visible beneath her skin, ash-colored half-circles under her eyes. “What will you do now?”

She picked at a string on the chair. “I don’t know. There isn’t much money. Everything Larry got, he funneled into the
Times.”

I was taken aback by the frank bitterness in her tone. “The
Times
will continue to publish?”

She shrugged. “I guess it will. I’ve more or less turned it over to Andrew Baffrey. That paper was Larry’s plaything, not mine.”

In the downward curve of Susanna’s mouth, I read the bafflement and frustration of someone who has felt unfairly excluded. I could well imagine that Larry Hawkins hadn’t been an easy person to live with. Thanking her again, I turned to go, and as I walked to my car I could hear the children shouting, the dog barking in the backyard.

Back home, over a sandwich, I looked at the papers Susanna had gathered for me. There was nothing I didn’t already know. As I closed the folder, feeling guilty once again that she had gone to the trouble, the phone rang.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gotten two phone calls in one day. I answered the kitchen extension. Again, the voice on the other end was unfamiliar, but this time it was male. “Mrs. Longstreet?”

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Longstreet, I have some advice for you. Are you listening?”

The low, expressionless tone made my stomach tighten. “Who is this?”

“Here’s the advice,” the voice went on. “Stay away from the
People’s Times.
If you don’t, there could be trouble.”

The word “trouble” vibrated in my ear as I heard the receiver go down on the other end of the line. Although I knew the connection was broken I sputtered, “Just who the hell are you?” Nobody answered, so there was nothing left to do but hang up.

After three minutes of blind panic, I started to get angry. Only one person could be responsible for a sinister call telling me to stay away from the
People’s Times,
and that person was Richard. Obviously, he was having me followed.

The thought infuriated me as I had rarely been infuriated. Richard had walked out, declared his independence of me and his indifference to my actions, but he wasn’t decent enough to leave me my privacy. I went to the living room and looked out the front window. The street was calm, looking almost bleached in the early-afternoon sun. A young woman passed, pushing a stroller. No cars with strangers slouched behind the wheel. No moving curtains in windows across the street.

I went to the glassed-in back room. It was quiet, the only sound an occasional
thwock!
from the tennis courts in the park. Through the luxuriant blossoms of the almond tree I could see the wind-ruffled, greenish waters of Mountain Lake. There were thick clumps of bushes everywhere, tall fir trees, an open-fronted concrete-block structure where old men sat playing checkers. Lots of places to hide. Anybody could hide out there and watch.

The creepy fear that made my hands perspire also fed my rage. I grabbed my purse and slammed out of the house.

My anger was like a balloon, carrying me downtown. I sailed unimpeded through the traffic, constantly checking my rearview mirror to see if there was a suspicious vehicle behind me. It seemed only an instant after I left the house that I was pulling into the outrageously expensive parking lot down the street from Richard’s office.

The Redevelopment Agency was located near the Civic Center, in a featureless gray building that could easily have been converted to a cell block. Every atrocity of modern design had been visited on the lobby— glaring fluorescent lights that transformed flesh to dead fish, Muzak, a supergraphic of jagged orange-and-red lightning on the wall. Under the supergraphic, looking even more doddery than when I had last seen him, stood Pop Lewis, the security-guard-cum-doorman.

His hand touched the brim of his uniform cap, and he broke into a welcoming smile that revealed more gums than teeth to fill them. He greeted me with, “Mrs. Longstreet! Why haven’t I seen you around lately?”

Wonderful. Pop’s refusal to turn up his hearing aid must have prevented his getting in on the office gossip about the divorce. Not waiting for an explanation, he pushed the button to call the elevator for me, then nattered on. “You know, Mrs. Longstreet, my wife never stops talking about those fruitcakes you give us at Christmas. She keeps bothering me about can’t I get her your recipe. You know—” The elevator slid open, and I entered gratefully in the full knowledge that Pop wasn’t half as impressed with my fruitcakes as he was with the hefty holiday check Richard had always written to go with them.

The seventeenth floor looked exactly as it always had. The carpet was the same bastard combination of yellow and green, the walls still lined with drawings showing the neighborhoods Richard and his henchmen had knocked down or planned to. I walked around the corner to the door marked
REDEVELOPMENT AGENCY
in gold and, under that, in smaller letters,
OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR
.

The receptionist was new and easily cowed, so it was only a few minutes before I was in Richard’s suite of offices facing Tabby, his secretary. Tabby was notable for her rhinestone-decorated harlequin glasses, bouffant hairdo, and years-long crush on Richard. She had never liked me. I heard relish in her voice when she said, sweetly, “Mr. Longstreet is in conference at the moment.”

Tabby had always intimidated me. Now I realized that it no longer mattered whether she liked me or not. “Well, Tabby,” I said, my sweet tone matching hers, “you go tell Mr. Longstreet to get the hell out of conference, because I want to talk to him. It’s an emergency.”

Her rhinestone-encircled eyes went blank for a moment. Then, with a look at once dignified and murderous, she got up, walked to the closed conference-room door, knocked lightly, and went in.

Soon, she and Richard emerged. The shock of seeing him again nearly undercut my anger, and I felt my mouth go dry. I could tell by the set of his jaw that he was irritated. He glanced at me and said, “Hello, Maggie. Let’s go in here for a moment, shall we?”

He was wearing a gray suit and a maroon and gray patterned tie. His hair was a little longer than he used to wear it, and his tan was deeper— probably from hours on the tennis court with his athletic young lady love. Even when tight with displeasure, as it was now, his long, lean face was handsome enough to decorate a carved medieval altarpiece. I had always been willing to forgive him a great deal because of his looks.

As he ushered me into his private office he said, “This had better be important.”

“It is.” Richard’s office was the same, too. The massive desk, the rubber tree in the redwood tub, the Picasso imitation that hid the wall safe, and the sweep of windows with an incomparable view of the city hadn’t changed. The only difference I noted was that my photograph was missing from the bookshelves, although Candace’s was still in place.

“Well?” He neither sat nor offered me a chair.

“I came to tell you, Richard, that you’d better call off your bloodhounds.”

His eyes widened. “What?”

My anger was returning now, giving me energy. “The detective, or whoever it is you’ve got following me. I want it stopped.”

“Maggie, what are you talking about?” Richard’s tone was excessively patient, the voice he used with waiters when he sent a dish back to the kitchen at a restaurant.

“I’m talking about the fact that someone is following me. I can’t imagine what you have to gain by this kind of harassment. Please call it off.”

He spread his arms in an exasperated gesture of having nothing to hide. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never even considered having you followed.”

Of course he would never admit it. I felt my face reddening. “Look. There’s no point in denying it. I know I’m being watched.”

“You do?
How
do you know?” I saw patronizing pity in his eyes. His tone implied that he was dealing with a lunatic.

“Because…” I began furiously, then stopped. If I answered his question, I’d have to tell him about my visit to the
Times
. Presumably, if he’d had somebody make the phone call he already knew of it, but I myself wasn’t ready to bring it out into the open yet. “Let’s just say I have good reason to think so,” I finished weakly.

Now the patronizing air was stronger. “I’m quite sure you do,” he said. “But if someone is following you I’m not responsible. You said it yourself. What would I have to gain?”

“I don’t know.” I made my tone as frigid as I could, but I had lost ground and I knew it.

Richard glanced at his watch. “You know, Maggie, if San Francisco is getting on your nerves, why don’t you consider getting away for a while? You could go back to Mazatlan. You liked Mazatlan, didn’t you? Or Greece. We never got to Greece. I could have Tabby make all the arrangements for you.”

At this false solicitude, I felt a stirring of something more solid than anger. After a moment I identified it as pure, astringent, honest dislike. “I have no intention of leaving town, Richard,” I said. “If my presence is getting on your nerves,
you
go to Mazatlan. And in the meantime, if you’re lying and you
have
had someone watching me, I suggest you call him off before I contact the police.”

I left him no time to reply and sailed out past the assiduously typing Tabby and down the hall to the elevator.

The afternoon traffic was beginning to fill the streets, and the drive home seemed many times longer than the trip downtown had been. Sitting behind a bus, watching the traffic light ahead change to red once again, I felt my head begin to throb. Maybe it was impossible to get a foothold on the slick surface of Richard’s urbanity. He said he wasn’t having me watched. Even after being married to him for twenty years, I couldn’t tell if he was lying. A stronger throb went through my head, and I put it on his lengthening account. Seeing him again had been a mistake.

When I got home I again looked around for unfamiliar cars or suspicious characters, but the only person in view was the Japanese gardener digging in a neighbor’s yard. I climbed wearily to the front door. Who would care if I visited the
Times
? Only Richard. If Richard knew what I was up to, he would care, so Richard must be responsible for the phone call. I should get in touch with the cops. Put the cops on him, let them take care of it. I pictured myself explaining to the police that my husband, a distinguished political figure who played tennis with their bosses, was behind a threatening phone call to me. I pictured the police calling Richard to discuss it with him, and Richard explaining that I was a little bonkers but he’d try to see that they weren’t disturbed again.

My head was worse. I kicked off my shoes and lay down on the couch, but I couldn’t rest. “There could be trouble,” the voice had said. I wouldn’t call the police, but there was something I would do. I got up to call Andrew Baffrey.

Andrew sounded surprised, but not displeased, to hear from me. “What can I do for you?”

“It’s about what we discussed this morning. Something’s happened, and I wanted to ask you—”

“Wait a second,” he broke in. “I don’t want to dazzle you with cloak-and-dagger tactics, but I’d rather not discuss this on the phone. I was just leaving. Would you like to meet me in a dark alley, or preferably your neighborhood bar, for a face-to-face conversation?”

“There aren’t any bars in my neighborhood.”

“Too bad for you. I live next door to one. Where do you live, anyway?”

“Presidio Heights. Lake Street. Next to the park.”

He laughed. “Anybody tries to put a bar in that neighborhood, the Planning Commission goes into special session to quash the idea. But never mind, here’s another suggestion. I have to stop by Susanna Hawkins’s, and then I was going to have an early dinner. Why don’t you meet me and we’ll grab a bite together?”

It would beat a frozen spinach souffle. “Fine. Where?”

“Have you ever been to the Food as Spiritual Healing Ashram Restaurant?”

“The what?”

“I thought not. You’ll love it. It’s run by Sufis, or Hare Krishnas, or some sect like that. The best thing about them is they give you lots of food cheap. It’s vegetarian. You don’t mind vegetarian, do you?”

I didn’t mind vegetarian. The restaurant, a tiny hole in the wall near the intersection of Market and Castro streets, had a couple of fresh daisies on every table. Eating my way through a huge plateful of eggplant curry and brown rice that had been served by a shaven-headed Food as Spiritual Healing devotee, I was almost inclined to agree with the printed cardboard placard on the table:
A FULL STOMACH; A HAPPY HEART; A SOARING SPIRIT
. Certainly the ashram’s guru, whose blown-up photograph adorned all four walls, seemed to have eaten himself into a blissful state of benignity and tubbiness. “So what happened?” asked Andrew.