Muller, Marcia - [10] The Shape of Dread (v1.0) (html) (48 page)

I glanced back at the TV. Fran the feminist had metamorphosed into a
lesbian waitress named Ginny. "I wonder." I said.

"Wonder what?"

"Those tapes—there could be something in them."

"You mean something that would explain what happened to her?"

"Maybe… no, it's probably a stupid idea. Besides, I can't see myself
watching dozens of them—not when there are more promising leads I could
pursue."

"You might want to look at the ones that were made close to the time
she died. Everything I have is dated."

"Maybe I'll do that." I glanced at the clock on the VCR. It was
almost six, still dark outside. "Right now," I added, "why don't we
brew some of that fancy coffee? There are a couple of people I want to
catch off guard, before their morning shots of caffeine have time to
take effect."

When I arrived at Amy Barbour's building at a little after seven, a
man in a sweat suit was leaving. I caught the iron gate before it swung
shut, and he started to say something Then he shrugged and turned
downhill on the sidewalk. I climbed the stairs and pounded on Amy's
door.

For about thirty seconds nothing happened. Then Amy's voice shouted
for me to hang on, she was coming. The lock turned, a chain rattled,
and Amy's face peered through the crack; she was pasty complexioned and
bleary eyed, and her dark red hair stood up in little tufts. I wondered
if she always looked this bad in the morning or if her appearance was a
consequence of too much New Year's celebrating.

"What the hell are you doing here at this hour?" she said.

From her manner I gathered she hadn't heard about me finding Tracy's
body yet. I'd told Detective Gurski about the probable connection
between the cottage and the victim's roommate and had given him Amy's
address and phone number, but there were a variety of reasons he might
not have spoken to her yet.

I said, "There's been a new development, and I need to talk with
you."

Her mouth twitched irritably, but she stepped back, removed the
chain, and let me inside. The apartment was dark and frigid. Amy
shivered inside her long white terrycloth robe, then turned away from
me and fiddled with the thermostat of the electric heater. "It's just
as well you came by, I guess," she said. "I've got something to show
you."

It surprised me that she didn't ask about the new development, but
maybe she hadn't fully comprehended what I'd said. "What is it?"

She moved away, flicking on lights and heading for the kitchen. When
she caught sight of herself in the mirrored wall of the dining area,
she grimaced. "There, on the table. Shit, I feel terrible. I've got to
make some coffee."

I looked at the table. It was covered with all manner of things:
dirty dishes, an ashtray, sections of newspaper, books, playing cards,
a basket of moldy-looking fruit. "Where on the table?"

"Oh, for Christ's sake!" She strode over, picked up one of the
books, and thrust it at me.

It was a red and black paperback titled You Can Create a New
Identity, by an individual described as a "world-famous private eye."
I'd never heard of him. The book looked well thumbed, and a great
number of its pages were dog-eared. I turned to one, captioned "How to
Establish a Mail Drop," and saw various phrases had been underlined in
blue ink. In the margin was the notation "Los Angeles?" The handwriting
looked to be Tracy's.

I said, "Where did you find this?"

Amy dumped coffee into a paper filter before she spoke. "In Tracy's
room."

"When?"

"Yesterday."

"What were you doing in there?"

"Just looking around."

"I thought you were afraid Mrs. Kostakos might catch you and throw
you out of here."

She shrugged. "I'm not anymore. I talked my boyfriend into letting
me move in with him. I'm sick of Mrs. K and her weirdness."

"Has she done something since we last talked?"

"You bet your ass she has. She showed up on Friday like usual, so I
thought I was rid of her for the week. Then she turned up on New Year's
Eve. My boyfriend and I came back from having dinner, all set for a
nice quiet evening, if you know what I mean. Then we smell the old
gardenias. Surprise! She's in there. Stayed there all night, too. We
didn't want to drive across town to his place—we'd been drinking, and
the sobriety checks, you know. So we stayed here and we couldn't… well,
do anything because of the walls being so thin. Anyway, I got mad and
said fuck it. As of tomorrow I'm out of here. I haven't paid my share
of the rent for this month, and I don't intend to. If Mrs. K wants, she
can. Then she can sit there all day every day for all I care."

I frowned, disturbed both by Laura Kostakos's actions on New Year's
Eve and by the book in my hand. This slim but colorful volume was not
something I would have overlooked in my search of Tracy's room; I was
certain it hadn't been there on Thursday night. "Exactly where did you
find this?" I asked.

"The bookcase, along with her stuff on comedy."

Then it definitely hadn't been there on Thursday; I'd examined those
books thoroughly. Someone had planted it—but who? Laura Kostakos? Or
was Amy lying? And if so, why? The only reason I could think of was
that she was trying to make it look as if Tracy had planned her own
disappearance well in advance. If that was the case, the identity of
the person who had killed Tracy was obvious.

My silence made Amy uncomfortable. She got coffee cups from one of
the cabinets, took out milk and sugar, then glared at
the teakettle on the stove, tapping her fingers on the counter. "Look,"
she finally said, "just take the book and go, will you? I've got to get
ready for work. Everybody else has a holiday, but do I? Hell, no."

She wanted me to leave immediately, but she'd taken out two cups.
"Is your boyfriend here, Amy?"

"What? No." She looked down at the cups. "All right— yes. Just go,
okay?"

She seemed excessively evasive for an emancipated young woman who
had just declared her intention of moving in with the man. I pulled out
a chair at the table and sat down.

"What're you doing? I told you to—"

"Don't you want to know about the new development in the case?"

"The new… oh, I thought that was just an excuse to get in here and
hassle me some more."

"It was no excuse. Tracy's body has turned up. At a cottage on the
Napa River, owned by people named Barbour."

What little color she'd had drained from her face. Her mouth went
slack, and she sagged against the counter.

"She's been dead the whole time, Amy. Hidden in that old fishing
boat on the riverbank. She's nothing but bones."

"No no no no!"

"All this time she's been there—and you knew, and you never told."

"I didn't! I—" Toward the front of the apartment, a door opened. Amy
swung horror-struck eyes in the direction and snouted, "No!"

"Amy, what the hell?" A man came through the living room in a rush:
a big, chubby, bathrobe-clad fellow with a clown's face. The wide mouth
turned down in dismay when he saw me.

I stood up. "Marc Emmons," I said. "I've been trying to reach you
for days."

"Who… ?" He looked at Amy. "This is her?"

She nodded.

Emmons quickly went to stand beside her, one arm thrown protectively
around her shoulders. Both their robes and their early-morning
unattractiveness were a perfect match.

"What have you been doing to her?" Emmons demanded.

"Relaying some news you should hear, too. Tracy Kostakos's body has
been found. She's probably been dead since the night she disappeared.
But perhaps you knew that, Marc. Amy did."

"I didn't! I swear I didn't!" Amy said.

Emmons barely reacted to the news—a tightening of his mouth, but
nothing more. He put his other arm around Amy, as if to shield her from
my accusation. "What makes you think that?" he asked.

"She was found near a cottage on the Napa River. I believe the
property belongs to Amy's family."

Emmons looked down at her. "The old summer place?"

She nodded, teeth chattering.

"So that's what happened," he said softly.

"You don't seem particularly upset by the news."

"I'm not a person who likes to show emotion in front of strangers.
Besides, Tracy's been gone a long time, and I've made a new life for
myself."

"Obviously."

"Look, let's sit down and have some coffee." He released his hold on
Amy. "Honey, get us some, huh?"

As if it understood his words, the kettle shrieked. Amy started and
turned toward the stove. Emmons motioned at the chair I'd been
occupying. "Please?"

I sat, and he took a chair on the other side of the table, in front
of the window. Dawn had broken over the East Bay hills; a thin line of
opalescent light showed between their tops and the clouds that lowered
over them. Emmons's face was in shadow,
but I could see that his clown's mouth pulled down at its corners;
though he stared at the table in grim concentration, I sensed he wasn't
really seeing it. Was he thinking of Tracy? Or had he other things on
his mind—things he wanted to hide?

When Amy brought the coffee, her hand trembled so badly that the
cups rattled in their saucers. She scurried around the table and moved
the chair beside Emmons's several inches closer, so that when she sat,
their shoulders touched.

I said, "How did Tracy come to be at your family's cottage?"

She glanced at Emmons before she spoke. "She took the keys. She used
to go there a lot, whenever she wanted a quiet place where she could be
alone for a few days and think things over. Nobody else ever went
there. My father—the old bastard—is living in Mexico with his fourth
wife. My mother's back in New York with her third husband. And my
sister's too busy with her big-deal career in Silicon Valley to bother.
I haven't even been there in years."

"What were the things Tracy wanted to think over?"

"How should I know? Trace never told me anything."

"You said the two of you confided in one another. That you were best
of friends."

"I made things sound better than they were. I confided, she
listened. She was that way with everybody—and then she used them. You
think I haven't read what she wrote about me in her character
sketchbook? I'm not so stupid that I didn't recognize myself." Her lips
twisted bitterly.

"You say she went to the cottage often?"

"Yeah. Whenever she wanted to."

"How did she get there?"

"Get… ?" Amy looked puzzled.

"She didn't have a car. She didn't like to drive."

"Trace didn't like to drive in the city or deal with the parking
hassles, but she didn't mind it so much on the freeway or in
the country. She'd rent a car, or borrow one." Amy glanced at Emmons
again. "Sometimes she'd take someone with her."

"All right—when did she take the keys that time, and from where?"

"I don't know when. I keep a set on my key ring, and there was
always a duplicate set on the pegboard in the kitchen." She motioned to
it, next to the stove.

"Can you approximate when?"

"Not too long before she disappeared, or I'd have noticed they were
gone. She might even have come back here that night and taken them. I'd
gone to bed early—she was supposed to wake me for champagne for my
birthday when she got home—and I'm a pretty sound sleeper."

"When did you notice they weren't there?"

Her gaze slid away from mine. "Oh, not until after all the stuff
about the kidnapping."

"When you finally noticed, did you try to call her there?"

"There isn't any phone."

"Didn't it occur to you to tell the police to check the cottage?"

"Why? There'd been a ransom note, for Christ's sake! The kidnapper
wouldn't have taken her to the cottage."

"But after that, when no more notes came and the kidnapper never
recontacted her parents, why didn't you tell someone about the missing
keys then?"

"I… oh, shit." She looked at Emmons for help, but he was staring at
the table again, a distracted expression on his face. "All right! I
went up there, about a week later. I borrowed a car from this girl I
work with. Trace wasn't there. But there was this blue Volvo in the
garage, and there was dried stuff all over the upholstery in the front
seat that looked like blood."

That startled me; for some reason I'd assumed the car had been in
the ravine in the mountains since shortly after Tracy had
been killed. It also angered me that Amy had been sitting on an
important piece of information all this time.

I said, "Why in God's name didn't you call the sheriff?"

"I was afraid. I mean, Trace wasn't there, but there was the car and
all that blood. And it was my family's cottage. And Marc—"

Emmons looked at her and frowned.

I said, "Marc told you not to."

She was silent.

"Why, Marc?"

His expression was still distracted, as if he was listening to the
conversation and thinking about something else at the same time, but
now it betrayed more than a touch of fear. He said, "I felt the same
way Amy did. They'd think she'd done something to Tracy. And if not
that… well, Tracy and I had some serious problems, and a lot of people
knew about them. I was also afraid they might suspect me."

"What sort of problems?"

"Well, basically we'd broken up. She still came around when she
needed something, but we weren't a couple anymore. She was seeing
others."

"Who?"

"… That wasn't something she'd discuss with me."

"All right, you were both afraid of being accused of something, so
you decided to forget about the car with the bloodstains. But why
didn't you come forward later when it turned up in the mountains and
Bobby Foster made a confession you knew had to be false?"

Now both of them were silent.

I added, "You'd have let Bobby go to the gas chamber to protect
yourselves, wouldn't you?"