Muller, Marcia - [10] The Shape of Dread (v1.0) (html) (35 page)

"Hey, what a hobby."

Jack's lean, craggy face broke into a grin. "What can I say—it's fun
living on the edge."

"The only way I want to do that is on the edge of the chair while
reading a good horror novel."

He began fiddling with a corkscrew. "Fear takes my mind off my
troubles."

"This Christmas was a rough one?"

"In some ways. In others, not so bad. At least I wasn't constantly
poking holes in somebody else's expectations."

I knew what he meant, having burst quite a few of those shiny
holiday bubbles in my own day.

Jack poured the wine into plastic cups and handed one to me. "Here's
to better times and new beginnings." When he touched his cup to mine,
our fingers grazed.

I sipped and looked away to cover my confusion. For a while now I'd
suspected that Jack was interested in me. It was an interest I didn't
want to encourage.

The Stuart marriage had not been particularly happy, but it had been
a long one. They'd wed while still in law school and stayed together
for twenty years, in spite of radically divergent politics and career
paths. But a move from Los Angeles to San Francisco and new jobs—hers
with a prestigious, conservative downtown firm, his with yet another
liberal law cooperative—had widened the chasm. Jack hadn't wanted the
divorce, and his misery was compounded when his ex-wife married her
boss a week after the final decree.

Even now, close to a year later, his pain was too fresh for him to
be able to base a new relationship on anything other than "how things
used to be." He would—for better or worse—compare every action of a new
woman to those of his former wife. He would expect either more or less
than she was actually capable of giving. I liked Jack a lot, could have
felt romantically inclined toward him, but I wasn't about to let myself
in for that kind of no-win situation. And I sensed that at this
juncture all he could handle was a frivolous, casual relationship—the
kind I no longer care to indulge in.

In spite of his self-absorption, Jack was not imperceptive. He
noticed my discomfort, cut bread and cheese and salami, and changed the
direction of the conversation.

"In addition to the pleasure of your company, I had a business
reason for asking you along today," he said. "I'd like to discuss a
case I need some help on. I've been debating
whether it's worth taking up your time, and I've decided it is."

"Tell me about it."

"Do you know what a nobody case is?"

"More or less. As I understand it, it's one in which the victim's
body hasn't been found, but there's enough evidence aside from the
purely circumstantial to assume that a crime has taken place. Physical
evidence of the death—bloodstains, an eyewitness account, a
confession—can prove the corpus delicti."

Jack looked surprised. "You read a lot of criminology?"

"A fair amount. I took a few courses in it when I was at Berkeley;
given my work, it's a natural interest."

"The reason I ask is that most people think 'corpus delicti' has
something to do with the actual dead body, rather than the body of the
crime. Probably because it sounds so much like 'corpse.' I'm having
difficulty getting the concept across to my client."

"I wasn't aware you were handling a murder case right now. Who's the
defendant?"

"A twenty-year-old black kid named Bobby Foster. Already convicted
and sentenced to death. Case was brought to us for appeal."

The name sounded familiar, but I couldn't place it. "Death sentence?
That's pretty stringent for a no-body case—and for such a young
defendant."

"The murder was committed in the course of a kidnapping. Special
circumstances. There's a confession—pretty brutal stuff. The victim
came from a prominent family: old money, and both parents are
professors at Stanford. She herself was a young comedian whose star was
rising fast."

Now I remembered where I'd heard Foster's name. "The Tracy Kostakos
case."

"Right."

"Jesus."

The murder had happened nearly two years before, but I remembered it
because the newspapers had given it prominence, and the chief
investigator, Ben Gallagher, had been something of a friend of mine.
The published accounts had intrigued me, and for a while I'd followed
the case closely. Now I recalled most of the details, with Jack
occasionally refreshing my memory.

Tracy Kostakos had been a very funny, highly talented woman of only
twenty-two. The summer before her death she'd stolen the show at the
Comedy Celebration Day at the polo fields in Golden Gate Park; for
several months she'd been headlining at Jay Larkey's trendy Café
Comedie south of Market, where she'd previously worked as a cocktail
waitress. On a rainy Thursday night, February twelfth, she disappeared
after finishing her nine o'clock show there. While the unexplained
overnight absence of most women her age in a city like San Francisco
would have been little cause for alarm, Tracy's parents and friends had
good reason to think something was amiss: all her life she had been
dependable and punctual—almost abnormally so.

From Café Comedie she was supposed to go to an improvisational
session at the loft of a friend near India Basin. She'd attended the
same sessions with more or less the same group of participants for
close to three years and never missed one. Her absence was commented
upon.

The improv sessions usually broke up about two in the morning. Tracy
always returned immediately to the apartment she shared with a friend,
Amy Barbour, on Upper Market Street. That morning she had promised to
wake her roommate when she came in for a very special reason: the
thirteenth of February was Amy's twenty-first birthday, and the friends
planned to share a first legal bottle of celebratory champagne. Tracy,
however, didn't come home.

Friday was Tracy's day to travel to Palo Alto for lunch with her
mother, Laura Kostakos. But before that she had planned to
attend an early call for actors at a casting office on Fillmore Street.
The audition was for a TV commercial for Wendy's restaurants, to be
shown in test markets in the Midwest. While landing the role didn't
guarantee national exposure, it was a step in that direction, and Tracy
Kostakos was as interested in the lucrative television market as any
other rising—and largely underpaid—comedian. But she never showed at
the casting office, and friends who would have been competing against
her were both relieved and concerned.

In her office in the mathematics department at Stanford University,
Laura Kostakos waited for Tracy's call from the train station. Tracy
had assured her she would reach Palo Alto for their standing luncheon
date at the usual hour of one-thirty, but when she'd heard nothing by
three, Mrs. Kostakos called her husband, George, in his office in the
psychology department. He had had no word from Tracy, either. Later
Laura Kostakos told reporters that while she wasn't superstitious, she
hadn't been able to keep from thinking about it being Friday the
thirteenth.

Officially the police could do nothing about Tracy's disappearance
until seventy-two hours had passed, but long before that a barely
literate, poorly typed ransom note arrived at the Kostakoses' Palo Alto
home. A modest ransom note, as such things go: the kidnappers wanted
only $250,000.

The FBI was brought in. The Kostakoses got the ransom money
together, and agents waited with them for the promised Sunday-evening
call from the kidnappers. It never came. No further notes arrived. They
never heard from their daughter again.

By the middle of the next week, the investigation focused on Bobby
Foster, who was working as a valet parking attendant at Café Comedie.
He had been seen by one of the other valets and a pair of patrons
arguing with Tracy on the sidewalk in front of the club after her last
performance. Bobby had
an explanation: Tracy—who disliked driving so much she'd declined her
parents' offer of a car of her own—had been nervous about waiting for
her bus on a dark corner two blocks away and had asked him to walk over
and wait with her. When he'd refused—because Jay Larkey, owner of the
club, was notorious for firing valets who didn't tend to their
jobs—they'd quarreled. But his story didn't ring true. Tracy reportedly
had an ample allowance from her parents and could easily have afforded
a cab if she were really uneasy. And besides, according to all who knew
her, she was fearless when it came to walking dark city streets alone.
It was unlikely she would have asked Bobby to risk his job for such a
reason—not when he was such a good friend that she had a standing
appointment to tutor him for his high-school-equivalency exams on
Wednesday afternoons.

Bobby Foster stuck to his story, stubbornly refusing to get a
lawyer, but balked at taking a polygraph test. Eventually he consented,
and while he didn't pass with flying colors, the results were
inconclusive enough to make the authorities lose interest in him.

By late spring the FBI had withdrawn from active participation in
the case; the SFPD's investigation dragged. Then in June the wife of
Jay Larkey's partner at Café Comedie— where Foster was no longer
employed—came across a notebook he had left behind in the employees'
lounge, and turned it over to the police. It was one he had used in his
tutoring sessions with Tracy for the equivalency exams; in it were
several nude sketches of a woman who resembled her, and a number of
misspellings that matched those found in the badly typed ransom note.

The police moved cautiously, questioning Foster again but not
holding him.

In late July a dark blue Volvo with bloodstained upholstery turned
up in a ravine in the Santa Cruz Mountains, some seventy miles south of
San Francisco. Its owner had reported it
stolen from Café Comedie's valet parking lot the night of Tracy's
disappearance. The employee who had parked it was Bobby Foster; his
fingerprints appeared inside it—as did those of Tracy Kostakos. The
bloodstains on the front seat matched Tracy's type and subtype.

The police questioned Foster again. At first he claimed he had not
parked the Volvo. Then he said he didn't remember that particular car
or its driver; he parked so many in the course of an evening. But
finally he confessed to kidnapping and murdering Tracy Kostakos.

"You say the confession's grim?" I asked Jack.

He nodded. "I have a video of it. If you're going to help on this,
I'd like you to look at it, as well as read the public defender's files
and the trial transcript."

"What exactly is it you want me to do? What basis are you appealing
on?"

"The usual technicalities. But that part of it doesn't concern you.
I want you to work on the murder."

"On a two-year-old case, where there's already been a confession and
a conviction? Come on, Jack!"

He ran both hands through his thick gray hair. "I know it sounds
insane, Shar, but I don't think the kid's guilty."

"What about this confession?"

"He retracted it before the case went to trial."

"On the advice of his attorney."

"Before he had one. The kid was stupid, refused counsel because he
thought having a lawyer would make him look guilty. And you know about
false confessions."

I was silent.

Jack asked, "Did you follow the trial?"

"No. Last summer, wasn't it?"

"August. Case took a long time getting to court."

"I was away on vacation then. I never manage to catch up on the
newspapers afterwards."

"Well, one of the things that kept coming out at the trial was that
some people don't think Tracy Kostakos is dead— including her own
mother."

"They think she faked her own kidnapping?"

"Yes. Disappeared voluntarily, using the ransom note as a ploy to
throw people off her trail."

"Why would she do such a thing? Did she have reason to disappear?"

"That's one of the things I want you to find out."

"What about the bloodstained car?"

"Another ploy."

"Sounds far fetched."

"Maybe. But Laura Kostakos firmly believes her daughter is still
alive—so much so that she pays Tracy's share of the rent for her
apartment and keeps her room the way it was, waiting for her return."

"Maybe the woman's gone around the bend."

"Maybe. The Kostakoses separated before the trial."

"You said some people. Who else believes this scenario?"

"Jay Larkey, owner of the club she worked at."

Larkey, a man in his fifties, had risen to national television
stardom out of the comedy clubs of San Francisco. When his popularity
waned, he'd returned to the city and established a club of his own, to
give other straggling comedians the same chance he'd had. "Anyone else?"

"Her boyfriend, Marc Emmons."

"That's probably just wishful thinking."

"There's something else, though. The roommate, Amy Barbour. She
testified for the prosecution at the trial, but the PD had the
impression she wasn't telling all she knew."

I leaned my head back against the tree stump. The eucalyptus leaves
shimmered in the pale sunlight. The jay in the top branches had been
joined by several others; they screeched harshly—a fitting background
chorus for the tragedy we were discussing.

I asked,"What does Bobby Foster think happened to Kostakos?"

"If he has any opinion he's keeping it to himself. All he wants to
do is argue that they shouldn't have convicted him without a body. I'm
hoping you can get beyond that subject with him."

It struck me as an incredible long shot, to pick up on a
two-year-old trail that, even when fresh, had led investigators
nowhere. And I feared it would be a futile effort; in order to convict
in the absence of a body, the case against Foster would have been
strong. In spite of the prevailing romantic belief, only a very small
number of felons are convicted unjustly. I'd once heard a well-known
criminal lawyer claim that 96 percent of his clients were guilty as
charged; the other 4 percent, he said, were probably guilty of
something.