There's Nothing to Be Afraid Of (13 page)

By the time he turned back from the mailbox, I had pulled in beside his truck and gotten out. He was a big bearded man in work clothes and heavy boots, and he stopped, shading his eyes from the glare of my headlights. I crossed to him, pulling my jacket tight against the unexpectedly chill air.

“Help you, lady?” The man’s voice held soft country accents.

“I hope so. I’m trying to locate a ranch near here; it belongs to a man called Otis Knox.

“Knox? Name’s not familiar. He in cattle or horses?”

“Horses, I think.”

The man considered, then said, “I breed Arabians myself, and I don’t know anyone named Knox. Is it a big spread?”

“Probably not too big.”

Again he paused, then shook his head. “Doesn’t ring a bell. Sorry I can’t help you.”

Inwardly I chided myself for coming out here without more information. Of course Otis Knox, porno king, was not about to advertise his presence in this conservative ranching country. Still, anyone as eccentric as he would surely have attracted some attention . . .

“Wait a second,” I said. “This ranch is a little strange. The fellow collects things. He’s got a pair of golden arches form McDonald’s—”

“Oh, sure,
that
place. Folks call if Junk Food West. Guy’s some kind of crazy millionaire, a movie producer they say. Likes his privacy. Otis Knox is his name?”

“Yes. Can you tell me how to get there?”

“Sure can.” He led me around his pick-up truck and pointed back the way I’d come. “You follow Nicasio Valley Road down to the fork; it’s just a little ways. Bear left, onto Lucas Valley Road, maybe half a mile. The place is on the right, over a wooden bridge. You can see them arches right through the trees.”

“I thanked him, got in my car, and drove as he’d directed me. Lucas Valley Road was easy to find, but there were a number of places set back on the opposite side of a small creek, and many of them could be reached by wooden bridges that spanned the gully. I followed the road for two miles, then doubled pack, peering into the thick woods for Knox’s golden arches. It was full dark now, and I could see little more than the glimmer of distant lights beyond the trees.

When I reached the fork where the roads came together, I turned and started back. Otis Knox, the “movie-producer,” liked his privacy; it would stand to reason that he would not put his name on the mailbox. His neighbors, on the other hand, seemed fond of large stylized lettering and elaborately carved signs.

I drove slowly, looking for an unmarked private road, and when one appeared about three-quarters of a smile from the fork, I turned in and rumbled over the rustic bridge. The drive wound through a stand of eucalyptus and then came out in flat pastureland. The dark shadows of the arches rose incongruously in front of a sprawling ranch house with flagstone facing around the front entry. I had barely stopped the car when floodlights came on, illuminating the arches in all their gaudy yellow splendor.

A black Ford Bronco was parked between the arches. By the time I pulled up next to it and got out of the MG, the door of the house had opened and Otis Knox stepped out. He was dressed, as before in cowboy garb, and cradled a rifle in his arms. His stance, while easy, was alert. One careful fellow, this Mr. Knox.

When he saw who I was, he relaxed slightly. “Hey, honey,” he called, “you came to meet Babe the Blue Ox.”

“I sure did.”

“Had quite a job finding me, I bet.”

I nodded.

“But you managed anyway.”

“Of course—I
am
a detective.”

When I came up to him, Knox took one hand off the rifle and shook mine. In spite of his light words, his expression was wary. I smiled, trying to put him off his guard, and he smiled back, but the warmth didn’t touch his eyes. “How do you like my golden arches?” he asked.

“They’re very impressive. How’d you get them here?”

“Flatbed truck.”

“Must have caused quite a stir among your neighbors.”

“It had them wondering.” Abruptly he turned and started for the house. “Come on, I’ll show you the rest of the place.”

The exterior of the house—with the exception of the arches—was what you might see in any affluent suburb, but the interior looked like the playroom of a mad child. The slate-floored entry was filled with the kind of coin-operated machines that give forth with gumballs or plastic prizes, and in the archway between it and the living room stood a mechanical bull. The only normal object in the living room was a grouping of low, modular couches and chairs upholstered in a deep red. The rest was a mélange that made the décor I’d seen in Knox’s office seem tame.

Along the left-hand wall was a bar with stools that reproduced an old-fashioned ice cream parlor. Opposite it, five jukeboxes of various vintages lined up against the right-hand wall. There was a red-and-gold popcorn cart on wheels, half full of popped kernels; an ancient Coca-Cola machine; a three-foot-high statue of Donald Duck that apparently would quack at you if you fed it a quarter; an equally tall green ceramic frog hat sat open-mouthed beside one of the modular chairs; and a pinball machine, 1950s model. Over all of this, darting silver lights flashed, and when I looked up I saw a mirrored globe that once must have hung in a ballroom.

Knox had set down the rifle and was watching me expectantly. “Well, what do you think?”

“I’m stunned.”

He nodded. “Most people are. But now for the
piece de resistance
.” He crossed the room and pulled open the drapes that covered the back wall. A picture window overlooked the pastureland behind the house, with a stable and paddocks in the foreground and the looming shape of the mountains beyond. And dominating this pastoral scene was the floodlit figure of Babe the Blue Ox.

Babe was enormous, at least a dozen feet tall. His flanks bulged out as if he’d eaten all the cheeseburgers and fries the defunct Paul Bunyan Drive-in in Corvallis, Oregon, had ever served up. His fat cheeks puffed in bovine contentment. His eyelids drooped languidly. He was very blue. Not baby blue, or powder blue, or even just ordinary blue-blue. No, Babe was electric blue. Blue as the bluest neon sign.

“Good Lord,” I said.

Knox smiled, obviously taking my words as an expression of admiration. “Something, isn’t he?”

“Something.”

He closed the drapes again and came toward me. “Hey, sit down, relax. You want a beer?”

“I could certainly use one.”

He went over to the Coke machine and fed it a slug from a bowl that sat on the top of it. What came out was Stroh’s. He got another, opened them, and handed one to me. Then we went to the grouping of furniture and sat down opposite one another. Knox reached in his shirt pocket for a cigarette and matches, and when he had waved the match out, he put it into the mouth of the ceramic frog.

“The frog’s supposed to be a plant holder,” he said, “but I don’t like crap like plants. So I use it for an ashtray.”

I merely shook my head in amusement. Knox, with his boyish enthusiasm for his toys, seemed a harmless eccentric, and I took a long sip of beer while I reminded myself that in actuality he was a dangerous man. Knox was a ruthless operator in an industry that—much as he liked to portray it as sort of a home for wayward girls—routinely destroyed lives and people. I shifted my beer to my left hand and let my right one stray to the comforting bulge my .38 Special made in the outside pocket of my shoulder bag. While I normally didn’t believe in carrying the gun, tonight was one of those occasions when I felt safer with it.

Knox was watching me now, the wary light back in his eyes. “So what do I owe the honor of this visit to?” he said. “You didn’t come all the way out here just to meet Babe.”

‘No.”

As I’d hoped, he quickly supplied his own perception of my motives. “You want to talk some more about those old boys—Brother Harry and Jimmy Milligan.”

“Yes. I’m even more interested in what goes on in that neighborhood now. You’ve heard about the murder at the Globe Hotel?”

“Oh, yeah. One of the slopes. Too bad.” He swigged beer, unconcerned.

I controlled my flaring anger and said, “Yes, it
was
too bad. And I’d think you’d be a little more worried.”

“Why?”

“Well—what if the killer is the man who preaches in front of your theatre every day?”

Knox shrugged. “Honey, there are killers all over the Tenderloin. They bump people off in bar brawls, or while they’re mugging bag ladies, or rolling drunks. They push adulterated dope. Sometimes we’re lucky and they bump themselves off instead. But it’s a way of life there.”

“What if this killer has more of a motive than just random violence?”

“This killer? You mean Harry?”

“Maybe.”

“What motive would old Harry have?”

“That’s what I’m hoping you can tell me.”

“Me? Honey, I’m just—”

“I know; you’re just a country boy. You don’t know anything about what goes on in the neighborhood, in spite of having done business on that corner for—what did you tell me?—fifteen years.”

“That’s right.” He smiled blandly at me.

“And I suppose you don’t know anything about the people at the Globe Hotel, either.”

He reached into his pocket for another cigarette, frowning. “Like I said, I don’t have anything to do with that bunch of slopes.”

“They’re not all ‘slopes,’ Otis.”

“No? Well, maybe not. I wouldn’t know. I just mind my own business, look out for my theatres, and then—”

“I know, come home to your horses.”

He shook out his match and paused, eyeing me for a few seconds before he tossed it in the frog’s mouth. “That’s exactly what I do.”

“With a few stops along the way.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know a young Vietnamese woman named Dolly Vang?”

“Who?”

“Dolly Vang. She lives at the Globe.”

He narrowed his eyes in such a parody of thoughtfulness that I almost laughed. “Maybe I do,” he said. “They all look alike—”

“You were seen at the stairwell of the hotel with Dolly earlier this week.”

“Oh, that one.”

“That one.”

“Funny little slope. Took the name Dolly because she admires Dolly Parton. Wants to be just like her. Thought of bleaching her hair blond, but her mother wouldn’t let her. I’ll tell you, though, it’ll take some effort in the tits department—”

“What were you doing with Dolly?”

Anger flashed across his face, but he controlled it quickly, his expression settling back into its good-old-country-boy lines. “Well, what do you think I could have been doing—in a stairwell, for Christ’s sake.”

“I should have asked you what you were talking about.”

“What do
you
think?”

Now that he’d told me about Dolly’s show business fixation, it was obvious. “She wants to get into the movies.”

“Right. Little Dolly wants to be a star.”

“Does she know what kind of films you make?”

“Sure she does. Girl’s got eyes. May not speak the language so good, but she’s not stupid.”

“And she still wants to get into your films?”

“Sure.”

Duc Vang had been worried about his sisters’ eager adoption of American names and styles; I now wondered if he also had guessed Dolly’s ambitions. “What did you tell her?”

“What I’d tell any smart and willing young lady—once the production company’s moved over to the Crystal Palace, we’ll give her a screen test.” He smiled evilly and the country-boy façade dropped away. I was looking at the real Otis Knox now, and what I saw made me a little sick.

Unwilling to let him see my reaction, I said casually, “Oh, you’re moving the production company there too?”

“Yeah. Basement’s honeycombed with dressing rooms; you don’t need those if you’re only showing films. So next week I’m getting the work crews in there, and they’ll rip them out, and I’ll have one hell of a good sound stage. I tell you, that Dolly was impressed when I showed her what we planned to do.”

“You showed her?”

His evil grin widened. “Sure. Took her over there last Friday, when I got possession of the place. Gave her a little private screen test. That girl’s going to be all right.”

My fingers tightened around the beer bottle.

“Don’t throw it, honey,” Knox said.

“What, and waste good Stroh’s?” I force myself to take a last swallow, then set the bottle on the floor.

I was about to stand up when the phone rang. Knox excused himself and went to answer it. The instrument was straight out of the fifties—a Mickey Mouse set, where you talked into the ears. I sat there, watching one of the kingpins of San Francisco’s porno racket looking like a Mouseketeer with his headpiece on crooked.

“Yeah,” Knox said impatiently, “now what?” He listened for a moment, ten turned so his back was to me. “Tonight?” his voice was muffled now. “Why?” There was another pause and then, “Ah, shit! All right. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

When he turned to me, his face was twisted with annoyance. “Look honey, I’ve got to go.”

I stood up. “Is there a problem?”

He ignored the question and came to stand close to me—too close. “I guess you didn’t get what you came for, honey.”

I shrugged and reached into my bag for my keys.

He moved closer. “You come back some other night, we’ll take up where we left off.”

I could feel his body heat, smell his unpleasant, musky aftershave. Just before he reached for me, I stepped back and looked him over slowly, allowing my gaze to linger on his thinning hair.

Knox quickly put a hand to where its wispy strands rose in blow-dried waves from his widow’s peak. I smiled—as evilly, I hoped, as he had earlier. Then I turned and walked out of the house.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

When I got back to the city, I drove to the Tenderloin and parked in the same lot on Eddy Street as before. A fine rain was misting my car windows, but it hadn’t begun to come down hard; I walked over to Market, where Carolyn Bui’s office was, detouring a couple of blocks to take a look at the Crystal Palace Theatre. After talking to Knox, I was curious about the place.

It was a massive white structure, its façade begrimed and pitted. The marquee, which once had glittered with hundreds of colored lights, was dark, its bulbs missing or broken. There were cornices around the roofline—gargoyles and griffons and other fantastical beasts—but many had crumbled away, and scaffolding had been erected over the sidewalk to protect the pedestrians. The scaffolding itself was plastered with tattered notices of lost dogs, political rallies, and countercultural events. Graffiti was spray-painted there too: GAY POWER; NO VIETNAM IN CENTRAL AMERICA; PAT LOVES WALT; DEATH TO EVERYBODY. I stared at the last, then shook my head. Eventually, of course, the graffiti artist would have his wish.