Muller, Marcia - [10] The Shape of Dread (v1.0) (html) (57 page)

"How did she seem?"

Kathy turned, drink in hand, bracing herself against the edge of the
counter with her elbows. "You mean how did she act? Quiet. Lisa was
always quiet around me, probably on account of me being an owner's
wife. And frankly, I didn't encourage her. She was just a waitress, and
not a very good one at that. She'd been closeted with Jay in his office
for a while before Rob went back there, and Jay had probably chewed her
out about something, as usual."

"All right, you waited together at the bar. What time did Jim Fox
leave with the woman he met?"

"The… I guess while we were sitting there. I'm not sure."

"He wasn't involved in going over the papers with Rob and Jay?"

"… I don't think so."

"How long were Rob and Jay together in the office?"

"Not long. Maybe fifteen minutes."

"And what time did you drop Lisa at her apartment?"

"Two-thirty or so. I know we were home by three."

I had run out of questions. Suddenly I wondered why I had even
requested this interview. I cast about to make sure I had asked
everything I needed to. "Did you see Tracy leave the club that night?"

For some reason that bothered her. She turned back to the bar and
began removing a cork from the corkscrew. "I watched her routine, of
course."

"A number of people said she wasn't at her best that night."

Kathy shrugged.

"She also made a phone call before she left. Do you know anything
about that?"

"… No. All I remember is watching her routine from our usual table
in the last row."

"And after that?"

"After that she was gone. And that was it." The words were firm and
flat, but her body language told me she was lying.

Kathy came away from the bar, set her glass on a coaster on the
coffee table, but remained standing. "If that's all," she said, "I need
to get ready for an appointment that I have in the city."

As she showed me out of her big, heavily mortgaged house, her step
was lighter, as if she'd performed a difficult task and felt she'd
acquitted herself well.

I hadn't eaten lunch, so I stopped at Sam's on the Tiburon
waterfront. The clear weather had enticed a few diners onto the outdoor
deck, and I joined them, snuggling deep inside my heavy pea jacket. As
I waited for my crab sandwich, I thought about Kathy Soriano's
evasiveness.

She'd been relatively candid and forthcoming early in the interview,
possibly because the questions I asked were more or less what she'd
expected to hear. Then my revelation that it was Tracy, rather than
Bobby Foster, who had stolen the company car had shaken her composure.
And my question about whether she'd seen Tracy leave the club that
night had led to
her curtailing our conversation. I wondered about Kathy's relationship
with Tracy; she'd admitted to liking her, even though she wasn't "too
keen on women." Was it possible they'd been friends? That Kathy knew
more about what had happened than I'd initially suspected? Perhaps
Larkey could shed some light on that.

After I finished eating I called the club. Larkey was there, dealing
with yet another representative of PG&E about the persistent gas
leak. He told me he would be in a meeting with Rob Soriano and his tax
accountant until three; why didn't I come by at three-thirty? I said I
would, and started back to the city. I wanted to stop once again at
Mclntyre's former building; Kathy's report of what the manager had told
her about Lisa's departure wasn't particularly enlightening. Then I'd
check the microfilm room at the library for the copy of the L.A. Times
before keeping my appointment with Larkey.

I was buzzed in as soon as I rang the manager's apartment at the
building on Pacific Avenue. The smell of baking bread from the store
downstairs wafted up as I climbed to the second floor. It would be
hell, I thought, to live over a bakery. The instant they took their
wares from the oven in the morning, I'd be down there, my nose pressed
to the glass, waiting for them to open.

The manager looked as if she'd never so much as glanced at a
croissant. She was extremely thin, clad in black jeans and a turtleneck
that emphasized the spareness of her frame, and had milky white skin
that pulled so tight over her cheekbones that it seemed nearly
translucent. Her youthful clothing and long hairstyle belonged on a
woman in her twenties or thirties; her eyes hinted at at least two more
decades of experience. She came into the hallway rather than admit me
to her apartment. As we spoke, she pulled off the browned and shriveled
fronds of a half-dead Boston fern that hung from a
skylight at the top of the stairs.

Her name was Ms. Wilson, she said, and yes, she had been manager
when Lisa Mclntyre had lived there. No, she didn't remember the woman
from the comedy club who had come looking for Lisa after she'd moved
out. That had been a bad year, and it was possible she had forgotten
the visit. I braced myself for the story of the bad year—strangers have
a way of confiding their tales of woe in me—but none was forthcoming.
Ms. Wilson, it turned out, was a woman of few words.

I said, "The woman who was looking for Lisa claims you said she
'skipped out' without giving notice and left a lot of her things
behind."

The manager frowned. "I said no such thing—if I spoke to this person
at all. Lisa didn't give notice, but she left me a note saying to keep
the security deposit to make up for the lost rent. The apartment was
furnished; she took what was hers, left what belonged there. I wouldn't
call that skipping out, would you?"

"No, certainly not. Did you keep the note?"

"There was no need to."

"Did she leave a forwarding address for her mail?"

"No."

"Didn't that strike you as odd?"

She permitted herself a small smile; it seemed to cost her a fair
amount of effort. "Most of what the tenants do strikes me as odd."

"Did Ms. Mclntyre have many visitors while she lived here?"

"I don't know. I keep to myself and hope the tenants do the same."

"Did you see her move out, perhaps see someone helping her?"

"No."

"And no one has inquired after her?"

"No."

"Is it possible you've forgotten, seeing as it was a bad year?"

She closed her left hand over the dead fronds she held, crushing
them to dust. Her fingers were bony, their skin as pale and stretched
as that of her face. "It wasn't that bad a year. Now that I've had a
few minutes to reflect on it, I'm sure no one came looking for her.
That woman who says she did, whoever she is, is lying to you."

Someone sure was.

There was a pay phone in the bakery downstairs, so I stopped and
checked in with Rae at All Souls. When she came on the line, her voice
was high-pitched with excitement.

"Where the hell have you been?" she demanded. "I have this news for
you, and you never call in!"

"What is it?"

"Your friend Johnny Hart got me the information you wanted on
Mclntyre from the food service workers' union. Sharon, you were right!
Listen to this: The Great American Laugh-in, 27333 Reseda Boulevard,
Reseda. I've already checked; there's no residential listing for her
down there."

It was another comedy club; she hadn't been able to stay away from
them. Not Lisa Mclntyre—Tracy Kostakos hiding behind Lisa's identity.

I rummaged for my pad and pencil. "Reseda. That's—"

"L.A. area, in the San Fernando Valley. From the airport, you take
the 405 freeway north, then swing west on 101. Reseda Boulevard
intersects it."

"Great. Call—"

"US Air."

"And find out—"

"They have flights leaving for LAX almost every hour.You've got a
reservation on the three o'clock one open return." 

"I'll need a—"

"Car. It's reserved. National."

"One more thing: I've got an appointment with Jay Larkey in half an
hour. Cancel it, and tell him I'll be in touch later."

"Will do."

"Rae, thanks. I'll check back with you… whenever."

Early rush-hour traffic crawled north from L.A. airport on
Interstate 405, past industrial areas and old tracts of small,
lookalike houses. After about ten miles the freeway began to climb into
the hills, and names made fabled in the days when motion pictures were
still a glamour industry began to appear: Sunset Boulevard, Mulholland
Drive.

I'd traveled this road many times before, en route from my parents'
home in San Diego to San Francisco and, earlier, Berkeley. Nothing much
had changed over the years except the swelling number of cars. I kept
wary eyes on the bumper of the van in front of me and tried to control
my mounting tension.

It now seemed that the theory I'd first dismissed as very shaky had
at least some basis in reality. Tracy had gone to the cottage on the
Napa River. Lisa had later joined her there. Perhaps the two of them
had been alone, perhaps there had been a third party. But the end
results had been Lisa's death by gunshot and Tracy's flight and
assumption of Lisa's identity.

She'd come to the Los Angeles area, a good place for a young woman
to lose herself. Since she had been a waitress before Larkey gave her
her chance at performing, it had been easy for her also to assume
Lisa's occupation. But she'd made the mistake that most people who
attempt to disappear do: she hadn't totally disassociated herself from
her prior life. She hadn't been able to keep away from the comedy clubs.

I was satisfied with those simple facts, but there were others that
still didn't fit. The stolen car. The premeditated nature of Lisa's
murder. The faked kidnapping. Tracy allowing her friend Bobby to be
convicted of a crime he didn't commit. The phone calls to her mother,
after nearly two years' silence. And the motive for it all…

I would find that out soon, and when I did—

The brake lights on the van in front of me flared. I jammed my foot
down hard on the pedal. The car—a low-budget Japanese import—shuddered
to a stop inches from the van's bumper. I restarted it and crept up the
grade in pace with the rest of the traffic.

At the point in a case when assorted facts start to form a more or
less understandable pattern, I usually feel a thrill of excitement. But
now I felt only a strung-out tension and queasiness in my stomach—a
dread of what I would find out. A dread of what additional horrors I
would have to offer up to George.

He didn't deserve for his daughter to be embroiled in such a mess.
Neither did Laura. True, George had been a "fondly absent" father;
true, Laura had been a cold mother. But they had loved Tracy. Whatever
I was about to find out was guaranteed to be bad, perhaps more than
even George could bear, and certainly enough to topple Laura's
precariously balanced sanity.

And bad for you, too, my all-too-truthful inner voice told me.
Disastrous for this new relationship—the first that's promised to
matter in a long time—for you to be the one who blows it
all wide open. You don't deserve that.

But Bobby Foster didn't deserve to die, either.

My stomach spasmed. I gripped the steering wheel harder, forcing
down the queasiness.

Near Sherman Oaks the interstate dipped down into the San Fernando
Valley and crossed the Ventura Freeway. Traffic slowed close to a
standstill on the westbound access ramp, then speeded up after it
completed the merge. The exit for Reseda Boulevard, according to my
map, was only about four miles beyond the interchange. As I drove, I
squinted into the glare of the setting sun, its red and orange and gold
smeared across the car's windshield, all but obscuring what lay ahead
of me. By the time I coasted off the freeway and turned north, my eyes
had begun to smart.

The boulevard was a wide one, lined at first with stores and
restaurants and gas stations. Farther on, I came upon a vast area of
apartment buildings: two and three-storied stucco with the obligatory
tiny lawns and palm trees, arranged around courtyards containing the
obligatory tiny swimming pool and more palm trees. Many of their
balconies overlooked the boulevard; they were furnished with lounge
chairs from which tenants could view the passing cars, and potted
plants that had somehow adapted to breathing exhaust fumes. Weber
barbecues and hibachis stood as mute testimony to the good life.

Farther on, in Reseda proper, business establishments regained
prominence. I checked the address Rae had given me and began watching
for The Great American Laugh-in. It appeared on the left, between a
Mexican restaurant and a shoe store. Parking was plentiful; I pulled
into a metered space directly across the street.

Like Café Comedie, the club had a colorful facade— yellow, green,
and orange—but it gave off a less sophisticated aura, as if its
relative proximity to Disneyland had caused it to be exposed to too
strong a dose of sunny, cloying fun.
A former storefront, its blacked-out windows were painted with a
barrage of balloonlike happy faces. As I crossed the street, I saw that
twin clowns on either panel of the double entry pointed jovially at the
doorhandles. I made a sour face at the clown on the left as I stepped
into the dimly lit lobby.

Plywood cutouts of more clowns greeted me: one pointed the way to
the checkroom, another to a door marked RESTROOMS; a third had a
mechanical arm that semaphored toward the club proper. I went that way,
feeling the breeze from the arm's whirling. The large room's
arrangement was also similar to that at Café Comedie, except the bar
ran along the right-hand wall.

A woman's husky voice said, "We don't open until six, ma'am."

It was only a little after five now. "Then what's he doing on the
job so early?" I motioned at the clown.

The woman laughed. She was perched on a stool at the end of the bar,
a calculator and stack of order forms in front of her, and wore a
costume that made her resemble Ronald McDonald. "Switch is broken. Son
of a bitch never stops flailing around. Like a lot of men I know."