The Hidden Man (17 page)

THAT EVENING

THE PACIFIC MAJESTIC THEATRE—SAN FRANCISCO’S FINEST

T
HE STREETS WERE
quickly darkening with an incoming fog. Late vendors trundled home from their markets in horse-drawn wagons while isolated cars and trucks weaved in and out among them. Blackburn drove his trusty used Model T with care; traffic was especially dangerous because of the random mix of animals and loud machines.

He pulled the Model T to the curb just a few yards from the front door, with its giant marquee that permanently announced “The Pacific Majestic Theatre—San Francisco’s Finest.” The theatre’s lights were off for the night, and the grandiose swirls of the building’s façade were laid over with shadows. Huge classic faces of comedy and tragedy hung above the theatre doors, peering through the foggy darkness.

All through his short drive to the theatre, he tried to think of why Captain Merced would call him at home on his telephone and order him to come to this remote place at this late hour, on a day off. What was there that could not be taken care of at the station?

If he and the captain had been on better terms, it might seem as if he were being called in to consult on a crime scene. Considering the ridiculous punitive assignment that Merced had inflicted upon him, nothing like that was likely.

His imagination could supply plenty of possible scenarios, none good. He had to give the captain credit for his flair for the melodramatic in having Blackburn meet him up on the second floor—the same place where they spoke on the night of Duncan’s first show. He supposed that the little man saw some symbolic value in that, something to increase his stature in his own eyes.

He felt certain that he would have to stand for another sneering lecture from the little bulldog. He reminded himself that this time he could not fall for being provoked into stupid action again, no matter what the man decided to shoot out of his mouth.

He tried the theatre’s front door and found it open, so he went on inside. There was just enough ambient light from the newfangled exit signs that were always on. So he moved across the lobby and up the stairs for the second-floor balcony, expecting to wait around for a while before the captain showed up. It took him by surprise when he topped the stairs to see him already standing up there, with two other men in plain suits on either side.

The three stood shoulder to shoulder, across the width of the balcony’s hallway. Each man held a cigar, three red dots floating in the balcony’s grim shadows. Blackburn observed that despite the fact that each of the cigars was freshly lit, the air was already blued by swirling smoke. These boys had been pulling on their stogies pretty hard. Nerves?

Absolutely nothing good could come of this meeting.

“Watch your step, Detective,” Merced called out.

“Thank you, sir. I can see well enough.”

“No, I mean
stop
!” Merced called out.

Blackburn froze, confused and growing alarmed.

“You don’t seem to understand, Detective. You could do real damage in a fall, here. Hard clay tile over concrete like that stuff is.”

Blackburn had not moved. “Why did you want me to stop, sir?”

“Isn’t it obvious, Detective? Look down! At the floor! Just a few feet in front of you!”

He looked. There was nothing but a long crack running the width of the hallway. In that moment, he recalled stumbling over that same crack the last time he was there. “What, this? This crack?”

“The one you so expertly spotted and reported to the City Hall Station. My station. My precinct. You damn well should recognize it.”

“Yeah, I noticed it the night of Duncan’s first show here.”

“Detective, the gentleman on my right is Wilford Cron. He represents Golden Bay Insurance Company. They cover this building.”

“Hello, Mr. Cron. Captain, am I supposed to keep standing here?”

“Indulge me a moment, Detective. The gentleman on my left is Nathaniel Simmons. He’s the head of Chief White’s personal security force.”

“I’ve heard about you, Mr. Simmons. Hello.”

Like Mr. Cron, Mr. Simmons said nothing in response.

“Detective.” Merced took a thoughtful pull at his cigar, lighting his face with a brief orange glow. “It may interest you to know that the crack that I just saved you from tripping and falling over, possibly even breaking bones on that hard tile floor, is a very long crack indeed. In fact, it runs through the entire second floor. One end to the other.”

“Yes, sir,” Randall replied, at a loss as to where this was going. “Crack runs one end to the other.” He remembered telling the desk sergeant to make a report on it, but after that he had forgotten all about the thing.

“You do not understand, Detective, but you soon will. That’s why we’re all here.” He took another pull at the cigar and continued without looking at him. “It may also interest you to know that this crack also runs down both walls on either side of the building, vertically, and then across the floor of the entire backstage area. From one wall to the next.”

“That sounds as if you mean—”

“I mean,” Merced interrupted, “that it runs all the way around. The Pacific Majestic Theatre—San Francisco’s Finest, is completely broken into two separate pieces.”

Blackburn felt mildly surprised, but still had no sense of why this bizarre meeting was taking place. He did not have to wait long.

“Detective, these men are here to personally assure you that they are acting with the full support of Chief White and the Golden Bay Insurance Company.”

“Acting as what?”

“Official representatives. To assure you that this will all be done with quiet support in the background.”

Blackburn let out a dry laugh. “All right, gentlemen, I’m getting lost.”

“Detective,” Mr. Cron said, “this building is built upon the ruins of the theatre that collapsed in this location during the Great Earthquake. It is barely eight years old. Furthermore, it brags of being one of the most modern post-earthquake buildings in the entire city. Do you understand?”

“No sir, not yet.”

“The city adopted strict earthquake-proofing requirements for everything constructed after the Great Earthquake. Showing that we learned from it, you know.”

“It didn’t last long,” Mr. Simmons from the chief’s office butted in. “City Hall realized that the codes were too strict. Everything was taking too long, buildings were costing too much money. But still, this was right after the Great Earthquake, and the city was desperate for investors. You see, Detective? We had to make sure that buildings got constructed, one way or the other. We had to get our people working and our city rebuilt.”

“Gentlemen,” said Blackburn, “the entire city knows that this theatre is built on one of those new steel frames. Why should a crack matter? Something like this, you get some mortar, some new tile, you patch it up. Right?”

Mr. Cron blew a thin stream of smoke and replied, “In the best of worlds, yes. However, certain compromises were deemed necessary in constructing this place…”

“What. There’s no steel frame?”

“Oh, it’s built on a steel frame, all right,” Mr. Simmons said.

Mr. Cron completed the thought. “They could have used more steel…”

“So these construction codes…” began Blackburn.

“They are well-intended rules, and were actually followed in some cases,” Mr. Cron the insurance man replied.

“And eventually dropped, in practically every instance,” added Mr. Simmons from the chief’s office. “Time, effort, cost.”

“And we have to consider the foul timing of this,” Mr. Simmons added. “It’s like the Devil planned it! We’ve just now got the goddamned exposition off to a successful start, just now looking like maybe the big gamble paid off and we’ll get a whole mountain of this city’s debt taken care of. So you think about everything that this implies to the rest of the world, think of what it would mean to the city’s entire reconstruction effort, if word got out.”

“Detective,” Merced went on, “the city is many, many millions of dollars in debt after building those exposition grounds up there. There is no way that the exposition can pay for itself, even though we’re running it for ten months.”

“Then why do you—”

“The exposition exists for the purpose of pulling investment back to San Francisco on an international level, for the first time since 1906.”

“All right, gentlemen, but this is not clearing things up for me at all. The theatre is broken in two, and what, you don’t want people to find out?”

“The maintenance man here was questioned. He knew about it but wisely kept his mouth shut until you reported it. He has been paid off and already left town. He was given enough to retire on, and he’s a young man. Do you understand?”

“All right. It’s vital to keep the flaws in this building secret, because they’re not supposed to exist. Now you can’t let anybody find out. Is that right?”

“That’s it,” Merced replied, “as far as the problem. But then that brings us to the matter of the solution.”

“Let’s go downstairs, Detective,” said Mr. Cron, the insurance man. “Let’s all go on down, shall we?”

They moved in silence down the stairs, through the theatre house, and back behind the proscenium arch, until Mr. Cron stopped them in a deep backstage area. They were near a stack of canvas flats that had been leaned against a wall for storage.

“Fire hazard,” Mr. Cron the insurance man muttered, pointedly glancing over at the flats. “Canvas on a wooden frame. The main stage curtain is fireproof, not all these drapes back here. All flammable.”

The three men stopped together, shoulder to shoulder, facing Blackburn. This time he wondered if they were doing it deliberately. There was a pregnant pause, awkward in the extreme, while the men studied their cigar tips and Blackburn waited for the second phase of whatever was going on.

He rubbed fatigue from his eyes for a moment, then decided to push things along again. “All right, we can all see that the crack is in the floor down here, too.”

“Yeah, we already know that. It’s the flats that worry me, Detective,” said Mr. Cron. “Some of them even look like they might have been done in oil paint. Who could be that foolish, using such a flammable type of paint? Why? Just to achieve some particular effect? It’s not worth it.”

Blackburn felt it hit him over the head like a falling spotlight. There was a heavy pause. His stomach seemed to spin in a full circle.

When he spoke, he kept his voice soft and low, as if there were a sleeping monster in the room that they ought not awaken. “Mr. Simmons, when you speak for the chief, I assume that he in turn is speaking for City Hall?”

“That is correct, Detective. Every responsible member of our city government realizes that this most unfortunate idealism we all felt in the aftermath of the earthquake did not meet with acceptance in practice. It’s not that we were wrong in abandoning the codes; it’s that they were ridiculously high in the first place.”

“Except that here,” Blackburn began, “it does seem as if they ought to have been just a tad higher, though. Yes?”

“Don’t get smart! Goddamn you, Detective, your report on this place is out there now. There’s no way we can get back every copy, or get to everyone who might have seen it. If you’d kept it quiet, we might’ve found some excuse to close the place. Discreetly. Now we have to make sure that nothing that may have been ‘rumored’ about this place matters, anymore.”

“Captain,” Mr. Simmons jumped in. “You have to admit that the detective has a point. Who can deny that the place could have been built better?”

“Those cans of kerosene shouldn’t be stacked back there. You know. Too close to the flats,” said Mr. Cron the insurance man.

“Oh, son of a bitch, Mr. Cron, you can stop all that right now. I understand, all right? You plan to burn down the theatre to hide the fact that it’s in two giant pieces. You’re here, Mr. Cron, to demonstrate that the insurance company is accepting of this plan, for some reason.”

“For a very
simple
reason, Detective,” Cron replied. “Paying to rebuild this theatre will be a fraction of the damage that we would take on if there was a major structural failure while this place was full. I don’t even want to think about it.”

“And you’re here,” Blackburn continued to Mr. Simmons, “because everybody from Chief White, right on up the command chain, plans to look the other way while this place burns down tonight instead of falling down tomorrow.”

“Fair enough,” said Merced, taking another thoughtful pull on his cigar.

All three men looked away from Blackburn and studied their cigars again. He wanted to shove the things down their throats.

In the back of his mind, he already knew where this was going, but it was so terrible that the thought had not made it into his awareness yet. Instead, he felt a sharp pain of anxiety twist itself through him.

“Detective Blackburn likes it blunt. He likes plain talk. He’s not one for dancing around the beast—eh, Detective?”

“I suppose not. Why don’t you just tell me?”

“I am telling you, if you are listening, Detective!”

Mr. Cron finished it off. “I know it’s hard to believe, Detective, but my company strongly prefers that this building should come down due to fire. And soon.”