Paper Phoenix: A Mystery of San Francisco in the '70s (A Classic Cozy--with Romance!) (8 page)

“Sure.” I’d thought about it a lot. I explained my fear that if I went to the police, Richard would make me look like a paranoid, if harmless, nuisance. I concluded, “So if I tell them, what’s accomplished? They probably won’t do anything, and we’ve tipped our hand that we’re on to him. For the moment, I’m going to go it alone.”

“Not
quite
alone.”

“No. I’m glad about that, too.”

He breathed deeply, sighed almost, and I thought how his pale skin looked golden, his hair and beard rich brown in the mellow light of the lamp. When he spoke, his voice was soft. “I have to tell you something. I haven’t played completely straight with you, Maggie.”

The first flutter of disappointment was followed, immediately, by a knifing, heartbreaking sense of betrayal. I
thought you were my friend,
something inside me wanted to scream, while another voice rushed in to say,
Calm down, calm down. You hardly know him.
I managed to ask, “What do you mean?”

He picked at a worn place on the knee of his jeans, and I noticed again the knobbiness of his wrists. “When you told me you thought maybe Richard Longstreet was mixed up in Larry’s death, you were throwing a lifeline to a drowning man. The waters were deep.” He hesitated, then went on. “Up to that point I had no doubt, no doubt at all, that Larry’s suicide was entirely my fault.”

It was the last thing I expected to hear, but in a way I was prepared. Andrew’s desperation had been evident when I first met him. Some of his reactions had been odd since. Here was the explanation. “But why?”

He said, tightly, “Because that afternoon, the afternoon before he died, I pushed him to the wall. He was finished and he knew it.”

“What are you talking about?”

He finished his drink and placed the glass carefully on the table in front of him, lining it up with the ashtray. “I’m talking about the fact that Larry Hawkins was a blackmailer. The people’s protector was no better than any of the crooks he exposed. The crusader was carrying the banner with one hand, while the other was in somebody else’s pocket.”

“Are you sure?” No doubt I sounded as flat-footed as I felt.

“Of course I’m sure.” His voice was charged with bitterness. “I would hardly sit here and tell you something like this if I weren’t sure.”

I could only blink and mouth questions, having apparently lost the power of rational cognition. “Who was he blackmailing? How do you know?”

He settled back, and I sensed that he was ready to tell the story. “You familiar with the name Joseph Corelli?”

“I don’t think so.”

“That’s not surprising. Corelli doesn’t aspire to be a public figure. But I’ll bet you know Luigi’s Pasta Palazzos, those Italian fast-food places?”

“Sure.” It was impossible not to know Luigi’s Pasta Palazzos. Their red and white striped awnings graced many San Francisco street corners, always signaling an aroma of garlic and tomato sauce wafting across the sidewalk.

“Corelli is Luigi’s. He started the original one, on Columbus Avenue, several years ago, and expanded from there. He made a lot of money. He’s the guy Larry was blackmailing.”

“What did Larry have on him?”

“I’m still working on that, but I’m positive Larry was taking money from Corelli regularly. It’s all down in the books, if you know what you’re looking for. It’s ironic”— Andrew smiled ruefully— “Larry’s the one who taught me how to sift through numbers, how to analyze a balance sheet, how to read documents. My proficiency is what did him in.”

Things were moving too fast for me. “How did you find out?”

“I have a friend who works part-time slinging lasagna at the original Luigi’s on Columbus. That’s where Corelli has his office. Anyway, my friend tipped me off that there were some violations of the health code going on down there. It sounded like a great story, so I started hanging around the various Luigi’s branches, striking up conversations with the cooks, seeing if I could see any rat feces, or insect remains, stuff like that—”

“I’ve eaten my last Luigi’s pizza.”

“I don’t eat there myself, any more,” he agreed. “Anyway, with the help of my friend, I thought I had a dynamite story. I got together an outline and went to Larry, and you know what?”

“What?”

“Larry told me, categorically, to forget the whole thing.”

“Did he give a reason?”

“Larry didn’t think he owed anybody explanations. He said drop the story, and he expected that to be that. I couldn’t accept it, though. I thought maybe he just needed more proof. In my spare time, I kept hanging out down at the Columbus Avenue Luigi’s. I figured if I could uncover a really flagrant violation, Larry would have to give in. And guess what happened.”

“Larry came in?”

“Right. I happened to see him, and he didn’t see me. He was hustling off down the hall to Corelli’s office. I watched him go in, and kept an eye on the door until he came out. When he left, I followed him. Right to the bank. What could be more no-class? I would’ve given Larry credit for a little finesse.”

I heard crushing disappointment in Andrew’s ironic tone. “Then you started checking the books?”

“Yeah. Once I knew what I was looking for it was easy. He’d been bleeding Corelli for a couple of years. Not for huge amounts, you understand. A few thousand here and there. Maybe ten or twelve thousand in all.”

“So you confronted Larry.”

“Oh, jeez.” Andrew rubbed his eyes. “The thing that sounds stupid and corny is that I looked up to Larry. I really admired the guy and what he was trying to do. That— the way I felt— made it worse. You have to understand I was madder than hell. I had my facts and figures, and I laid it out in front of him. He tried everything. Laughing it off, blustering, insults, telling me I was fired. Through it all, I pushed him to the wall. I didn’t know I had it in me to be so ruthless.”

He seemed to shrink, even now, from the memory of what he’d done. “It must have been awful,” I said.

He nodded slowly. “The worst was when he finally broke. He cried. He said he had to have the money to keep the
Times
going. The
Times
was his life and he had to keep publishing, and hitting up Corelli was the only way to do it, because the
Times
always lost money. It was literally the most painful thing I’ve ever been through.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say. Andrew’s eyes were red now, staring past me. “I didn’t give in,” he said hoarsely. “I thought he should have to live by the rules he set up. I told him I was going to call a guy I knew on one of the dailies and give him the story. Larry’s enemies would’ve had a field day. I wasn’t sure I’d really do it, but I wanted him to believe me, to spend some time stewing, and then I’d decide. The next morning, he was dead.”

Neither of us spoke. Of course this explained why Andrew had been so avidly interested in the fact that somebody else— Richard— might have been involved in Larry’s death. Andrew got up and stretched, as if trying to ease the tension in his body. Echoing my thought, he said, “When you came in with your story about Richard I was ripe for it. Anything to get the guilt off my own shoulders.”

I was so tired, so overwhelmingly tired that I wasn’t sure I could even reply. Debilitating fatigue had seeped into me bone-deep as I listened to Andrew’s story. “Let’s don’t talk about it right now. We’ll talk tomorrow,” I said.

“Right.” Andrew sounded as exhausted as I was. I walked to the door with him. Before I let him out he said, “Listen, Maggie…”

“Yes?”

“You understand why I confronted Larry the way I did? It seems excusable to you?”

“Under the circumstances,
not
confronting him would have been inexcusable.”

He bent and kissed my cheek. I felt for an instant his warm lips, the tickle of his beard. “Thanks,” he said. I opened the door, and he stepped out. “Make sure you lock it behind me.”

The reminder was unnecessary. As I slid the chain into its little socket, I heard his feet pounding down the steps. The Volkswagen’s motor started up, then got fainter as he drove away. After that, everything was quiet.

Tired as I was, I had suspected I wouldn’t sleep, and I didn’t. Being grabbed and threatened by a narrow-faced nicotine addict had engendered bodily quivers that wouldn’t subside no matter how many deep-breathing exercises I did. I left lights on in every room, and spent approximately half the night checking the windows and doors and the other half wondering if I should check them again.

During the time I was lying wide-eyed in bed I had plenty to think about. Larry Hawkins was a blackmailer. As he raged at others for doing favors in return for influence or money, he was playing the game himself. Obviously, Larry had seen his mission as higher than the rules governing petty, fallible mortals. Reading the
Times,
I had recognized his vision of himself as scourge to the powerful, champion of the powerless. In the face of that vision, if it took a little graft to get the job done— well, the job was the important thing.

Then there was Richard. There were dozens, hundreds, of possible explanations for the disappearance of Larry’s folder, but I didn’t have to worry about those. I had to consider only the single possibility, no matter how small, that Richard had taken it. I asked myself, in the glare of the kitchen at three
A.M.
as I checked the back door for the fourth time, how I would ever find out if he had.

Wandering through the house, I thought about my attacker, saw again and again his sharp-nosed, thin-lipped face. I wanted to scream, “How dare you!” like an uppity lady in an outmoded comedy. How dare he touch me, how dare he threaten me? What a strange and unexpected turn my life had taken. None of this could have happened if I’d still been married to Richard. “Don’t attend the Museum Guild again or you’ll be in trouble, Mrs. Longstreet”? Hardly likely.

At five
A.M.
I decided this was ridiculous. I doubted my anonymous enemy would show up now, and at this rate lack of sleep would kill me before he got the chance. Leaving all the lights on, I took a pill and barricaded myself in the bedroom, pulling my antique rosewood desk in front of the door. I put my head under the pillow, and in fifteen or twenty minutes I was asleep.

Later I awoke, startled, thinking I had heard something. The quality of the light in the room told me it was late morning. Surely there hadn’t been a sound. I tried to relax, and for a moment almost succeeded. Then I heard the footsteps. Someone was walking through the house, coming closer and closer. The steps came to my door and stopped. I sat up in bed, rigid with horror, convinced that in a moment he would shoot through the door, or batter it with his shoulder the way they did on television. Expecting cataclysm, I heard the politest of taps and a voice calling, “Mother?”

Candace. She must have driven up from Stanford. For a confused instant, I thought the man had to be there too, perhaps holding my daughter hostage. But when the imperious “Mother, are you in there?” came, I knew she wasn’t in danger. She had simply unlocked the back door with her key and come in.

“Just a second,” I called. It was a considerable effort for my fright-weakened muscles to move the desk, but I finally managed it and opened the door to greet Candace, who was wearing the frown she assumed when I had done something to embarrass her.

“Why are all the lights on?” she asked, walking into the bedroom. Taking in the displaced desk, she said, “You had that in front of your door? Good grief, Mother, what’s going on? Are you hallucinating or something?”

Candace was named for Richard’s mother, and she had inherited that estimable woman’s penchant for speaking her mind and damn the consequences. In appearance, fortunately, she was like Richard rather than the old lady. Perhaps this physical resemblance had contributed to the closeness that had always existed between them. “Hello, Candace,” I said, kissing her cheek. “You’re looking wonderful.”

She was. Her shoulder-length blonde hair was beautifully groomed, her makeup understated and impeccable, and no particle of lint clung to her plum-colored blazer and gray slacks. But she wasn’t in the mood for idle maternal admiration. “Daddy called me yesterday,” she said briskly. “I tried to get you last night, but you didn’t answer.”

“I got in rather late.”

“Mother, he said you came crashing into his office yesterday while he was in a meeting, insulted Tabby, insisted on talking to him, and then accused him of having you followed. I couldn’t believe it.”

“You might as well. It’s a fairly accurate representation of what happened.”

“Oh, Mother.”

If tones could wither, I would’ve been a shriveled leaf on the bedroom carpet. “Candace, I just got up. Before we go on with this, I insist on having a cup of coffee. Or, listen. We’ll go to La Belle Bretagne and have crepes for brunch. How about that?”

It was a play for time. The words
brunch
and
crepes
were an assured sop to Candace’s notions of sophistication. The frown smoothed out a little. If I were capable of such a suggestion I must have a shred of sanity left. “OK,” she agreed. Relieved, I went to pick out something to wear.

The atmosphere at La Belle Bretagne was as chichi as usual— bright green walls, tiny glass-topped white wicker tables, bentwood chairs, and lots of stylish ladies drinking Bloody Marys. Candace and I followed the
maître d’
to a white latticed booth that resembled an Easter basket. Although feeling less than stylish myself, I decided I still rated a Bloody Mary, and ordered one, while Candace settled for a glass of white wine. “So, how are classes going?” I asked, with my best imitation of brightness.

Candace wasn’t to be deterred. “I cut today because Daddy asked me to talk with you. I think he’s worried.”

Leave it to Richard to call out his most potent ally at the first sign of trouble. “Worried?”

“This business about somebody following you. It’s so paranoid. Daddy doesn’t know what to think, because he certainly hasn’t had you followed. And this morning. My goodness, Mother, you were
barricaded
in your room. Do you really believe someone is after you?”