He nodded curtly. “Lock the door after me and stay inside until the authorities get here.”
I watched him go, locked the door, poured myself a cup of coffee, and remained in the claustrophobic but warm guard trailer until I heard the wail of sirens approaching.
Lots and lots of sirens.
* * *
* * *
For a (usually) law-abiding citizen, I have spent way too much time at crime scenes, so I knew I would be here a while as the official process unfolded. I called home to let Dad know I would be home late, and did the same with Landon. I kept the details vague, saying only that I had run into a snag at work and was running behind.
Soon the alley and the theater were filled with uniformed officers, and the rescue squad had taken a now-conscious but groggy Gregory Thibodeaux to the hospital with a suspected concussion.
I spent a long time talking to a disgruntled Inspector Crawford, taking her step by step through what I had seen in the theater—including what no one else had seen.
The inspector gave me her patented one-eyebrow raise. “You’re saying a ghost usher is the perp?”
“I’m telling you, there’s some . . . stuff going on in that theater.”
When I met Inspector Annette Crawford at the scene of my first murder a few years ago, she thought I was certifiable. But we’d been through a lot together since then, and she’d experienced a few things firsthand herself, so although she remained troubled by the idea of spirits walking amongst the living, she no longer doubted me. Not as much, anyway. And because she was a consummate professional who wanted to solve murders, she would do what she had to, including taking a ghost buster seriously.
“So,” Annette said, glancing around to be sure we weren’t overheard, “what do you think? Were ghosts involved somehow?”
“I don’t think so. But if I learn anything more, I’ll let you know.”
“You do that.” She turned away, then turned back. “Oh and, Mel? If you’re smart, you’ll walk away from this job. Now. Not worth it.”
I nodded. “You’re probably right.”
“Like you’ve ever taken my advice in your life. Well, that’s all for now. You can go. Call me if you think of anything more or learn anything new.”
I nodded again and watched the inspector walk briskly over to a group of officers, who gave her their reports. I lingered on the sidewalk in front of the theater for a few minutes, surrounded by flashing lights and the crackle of police radios, trying to decide what to do next.
I was loath to go straight home. I adore my father, and Landon, and Stan, but at the moment I wasn’t up for the barrage of questions the men in my life were sure to ask. I needed to talk this out with someone experienced in my level of crazy.
So I called Luz Cabrera, my best friend. As soon as she picked up, I said “The Pied Piper, stat.”
“Be there in twenty,” Luz replied.
The Pied Piper bar at the Palace Hotel was old-school fancy and was named after a sixteen-foot Maxwell Parrish mural that had been painted in 1911 to celebrate the reopening of the Palace after the 1906 earthquake and fire. Once upon a time, the Pied Piper had been a “men’s” bar, and as one might imagine was lined with wood paneling and filled with comfortable club chairs.
I rarely went there. The once-smoke-filled bar was now smoke-free and welcomed women, but parking in the area was hard to come by, the cocktails cost an arm and a leg, and the hotel bar’s well-dressed patrons tended to sneer at my outfits. Luz, who grew up in a hardscrabble working-class family and took crap from no one, insisted I was imagining the snootiness, but I knew better. For me, one of the advantages of San Francisco was being able to walk into just about any establishment, dressed however as I wanted, without raising any eyebrows. The Palace Hotel, though, was an island of stuffiness in a sea of tolerance.
Luz liked it precisely because it was so fancy-schmancy.
I found her sitting at the bar, chatting with the bartender, a dish of maraschino cherries sitting on the bar next to her martini. No matter what she was drinking, Luz ordered a side of maraschino cherries. She considered them a bar snack, and insisted the usual mix of salty nuts and crackers didn’t cut it.
Today, Luz wore her long dark hair up in a sleek ponytail, and was dressed in an elegant cream-colored jacket and pants that I would immediately spill something on but that showed off her svelte figure to great advantage. If Luz wasn’t my best friend, I might well have held it against her.
“You look like you need a drink, my friend,” she said when she spotted me. She patted the barstool next to her. “Have a seat.”
“Just a glass of club soda, thanks,” I said to the bartender as I set my shoulder bag on the bar.
“Would you like some cherries as well?” the bartender asked, reaching for a tall glass.
“No, thanks,” I said.
“Oh, have a martini, Mel. You know you want one,” Luz said.
“I’m driving.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll keep you here long enough to metabolize it.” At my nod, she turned to the bartender. “A dirty martini for my friend, here. And bring me her cherries.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the bartender said.
We talked about Luz’s summer school classes for a few minutes while the bartender mixed the martini. When he set it in front of me, Luz held up her glass in a toast. “To the perfect way to spend an afternoon.”
We clinked glasses and took a healthy swig of our drinks.
“Good?” Luz asked. “The only thing better than salty olives and ice-cold gin is a sweet maraschino chaser. Sure you don’t want one?”
I shook my head. Luz munched a bright red cherry, dabbed her lips with a cocktail napkin, and fixed me with a look. “So. What’s going on?”
The thing about Luz is that although she teaches social work, she doesn’t actually care to hear about other people’s problems. Fortunately, she makes an exception for me and always manages to zero in on what ails me.
“It’s . . .” I gazed at the colorful Parrish mural above the bar, wondering where to jump in. “Recently, I feel like my life’s been getting awfully . . . complicated.”
“Welcome to the real world, my friend. This is what my students call ‘adulting,’ or what my mother would call ‘finally growing up.’”
“Yeah, well, it stinks.”
“And that is why we drink martinis. Come, now, Mel, don’t give me that. You know very well that life is complicated. Need I remind you of some of the highlights of your past year? What’s really bothering you?”
“A woman died.”
“Another murder?” she demanded, her voice carrying across the bar. A couple of corporate types at a nearby table turned to look at us disapprovingly. Luz returned their stares and they looked away.
“And it might not be murder . . .” I trailed off. What “natural causes” would have caused Isadora to be draped over the back of the Mighty Wurlitzer?
Luz continued: “But you’re involved?”
“It’s not like I’ve ever been involved in a murder,” I said, feeling defensive. “I just seem to be nearby when they happen, is all. It’s not something I set out to do: ‘Today I’ll pick up my dry cleaning, check out a new project at the Crockett Theatre, trip over a body, and traumatize myself, again, and then spend the next several hours getting grilled by the SFPD. Again.”
Her voice gentled. “Was Inspector Crawford there?”
I nodded, tracing a pattern in the frost on my glass. “You know your life is complicated when you know the homicide inspector’s phone number by heart.”
“I can think of worse things.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Knowing a defense attorney’s phone number by heart.”
“Good point.”
Just then, a man approached Luz and said, “Hello, gorgeous. Looking
for a friend? I’d like to buy you a drink.”
She gave him a scornful look worthy of Bette Davis and said: “I have a friend, here, pal, and it ain’t you. Go away and don’t come back.” As the man slunk off, she continued, without missing a beat. “At least Inspector Crawford knows you. She doesn’t think you’re involved, does she?”
I shook my head.
“So, who died?” asked Luz, her voice gentle.
“A young woman,” I said, choking up. “A, um, woman named Isadora. She was a dancer. She wore long scarves, like her namesake . . .”
“You mean, like Isadora Duncan? Wasn’t Duncan strangled by her own scarf?”
I nodded, feeling woozy. I took another sip of my martini.
“What was this Isadora doing at the theater? I thought it closed years ago.”
“It did. She’s a squatter; in fact she seems like the unofficial leader of the squatters living in the theater. Or she was, until a few hours ago.”
“When she died.”
“Yes.”
We both reached for our glasses and drank.
Silence reigned for a long moment.
“You know, Mel,” said Luz quietly, “you might consider going back into anthropology. At least then you were dealing with people who got dead long before you showed up.”
“It wasn’t that kind of anthropology,” I responded with a reluctant smile.
This was a standing joke between us: In graduate school I had studied cultural anthropology, which in my case referred to the study of current human cultures. Most people thought of anthropology in terms of Indiana Jones–style adventures, but that was actually archaeology. Although all the real archaeology I had witnessed involved crouching in the dirt in the sweltering heat, laying out sticks and strings and screens and grids, and it required a tedious attention to detail. No swashbuckling in sight.
But the old shared joke helped to calm me.
“So, what do you know about squatters?” I asked Luz.
“I don’t like them.”
“You don’t like anyone. Or at least you pretend not to. You’re not the curmudgeon you’d like people to believe you are.”
“Here I thought you knew me better than anyone in the world, and then you go and say something like that.”
“What about those Latino kids you made me ghost-bust for? And convinced my dad to let them sleep on his floor?”
“That was different. They were from the old neighborhood.”
“The thing is, Luz, these squatters at the Crockett Theatre, they seem like decent folks. In some way it’s more an offbeat collective than a homeless encampment; they have rules and chores, and it’s very orderly. It’s pretty cool, actually; can you imagine being a young artist and living in a baroque Moroccan Renaissance theater, creating your art, a new society . . . ?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Ready to join the commune?”
“I can think of worse ideas.”
“I don’t doubt that you can. But you’re forgetting one wee detail: Somebody was just murdered there.”
“Yeah, except for that. Also, there don’t appear to be any bathing facilities. But you know what they say, life is full of compromises.”
I gazed at the brightly hued mural of the Pied Piper, surely the most famous and romanticized of child snatchers, which put me in mind of the wall paintings at the Crockett Theatre. I made a mental note to start putting out feelers for artists capable of restoring the beautiful artwork, which could be challenging. The highly skilled ones usually had a long waiting list.
“Can you believe the hotel planned to sell this Maxwell Parrish painting during the last ‘remodel’?” Luz asked, noting my gaze.
“What I can’t believe is that they gave in to public pressure and kept it after all,” I said. “Sotheby’s estimated it would go for five to seven million. The hotel paid Parrish all of six thousand for it, back in the day.”
“How do you know these things?” Luz said, looking impressed.
I shrugged. “My mind works that way.”
“Speaking of remodels, how’s your own home renovation going?”
“Oh yeah.” I had forgotten all about Hildy. “Slight complication there, too.”
“I’m afraid to ask. What’s wrong? Cracked foundation? Full-copper repipe?”
“A ghost in the attic. Named Hildy.”
Luz fixed me with a look and signaled to the bartender. “I’m going to need more cherries.”
Chapter Seven
No, no, it’s okay,” I said. “She doesn’t appear to be bent on destruction, or whisper creepily, or anything like that. And no one’s been killed in the house, as far as I know.”
“As far as you know,” Luz repeated slowly, and gave me her patented concerned but vaguely pissed-off look. “Let me offer you a professional’s perspective, Mel. It’s not normal to have a ghost in your attic!”
Again, well-coiffed heads whipped around. The fellow who had approached earlier now seemed doubly intrigued. Luz ignored them.
Luz didn’t appreciate ghost talk, perhaps in part because she was able to “see” more than most people. After years spent denying her sensitivity to the spirit realm, she was slowly opening up to the idea. Very, very slowly.
She continued: “What does Landon think about this?”
“I haven’t told him yet. It’s been a busy day.”
Luz raised an eyebrow. “And . . . ?”
“And . . . renovating the house has caused enough stress already; I sort of hate to tell him. I’m afraid he’ll blame me somehow or something.”
“Why? Did you slay her mortal body and launch her into the spirit world?”
“Of course not. But these things do seem to follow me around.”
“But Landon knows that already. That’s sort of how you two met, isn’t it?”
I nodded. The first time I had seen Landon, he was kneeling over the dead body of his sister, whose spirit I had just encountered in the hallway. Not the standard Hollywood-style “meet cute” story.
“And you say this ghost isn’t scary? Was she part of the déjà vu you felt with the house?”
When I had first walked into the house, I had “visions,” not of ghosts but of memories of the house as my mother had experienced it when she lived there as a little girl. It was the first time I’d had such an experience, and it freaked me out, but eventually it began to seem normalized. Rather like seeing ghosts, I suppose.
“I didn’t experience any déjà vu with her, no. Just stumbled upon her when I opened a locked closet in the attic. She was sweet, actually, and gave me a really cool dress. I mean, maybe she’s masking a psycho killer personality or something, but so far she just seems like a flapper from the twenties. She said she was an actress in early silent movies. She mentioned Charlie Chaplin.”
“Huh. Is she connected to the Crockett Theatre somehow?”
“How do you mean?”
“She’s an actress in early films, and you’re working at a theater built during that time . . . ?”
“That occurred to me as well, but how could it be connected?”
She shrugged and finished her martini. “When it comes to you and weird supernatural stuff, Mel, all bets are off.”
“Yeah, thanks.” In a blatant bid to change the subject, I said, “Oh hey—not to brag or anything, but I climbed up into the attic this morning without panicking, thanks to your boyfriend.”
Luz, my way-too-together and always unflappable friend, blushed to the roots of her dark hair.
“He’s not my ‘boyfriend.’ I mean . . . I don’t think he is. Not officially anyway.” She ate her martini olive and fiddled with the toothpick. “How does a person even know something like that? Frankly, I don’t understand how you do it.”
“How I do what?”
“Deal with all these me
n in your life.”
“What ‘all these’ men? There have been all of two boyfriends, which I grant you is one too many, but still. Just Graham, and now Landon.”
“You’re forgetting Daniel, the man you were married to.”
“I didn’t forget. I made a conscious choice not to remember.”
“He made a good son.”
“That he did.” I missed that boy something fierce. Caleb had been in Nicaragua for a month, living with a family and working on his Spanish while coaching soccer at a camp for needy kids; in the fall he was slated to start college at the University of California at Santa Cruz. His father and current stepmother had recently had a little girl who was “practically perfect in every way,” so Caleb would be spending part of the rest of his summer with his bio parents instead of the Turner Clan, which irked me, even though it was natural and the right thing to do. Being an unofficial ex-stepmother wasn’t easy.
“Speaking of whom,” I continued, “Caleb is coming over on Sunday. Want to join us for dinner? I was thinking of proposing a Charlie Chaplin film festival. Maybe we could catch a glimpse of Hildy on-screen.”
“Her name’s really Hildy?”
“Yup. My very own attic ghost, Hildy Hildecott.”
“Did you just make that up?”
“No, it’s her actual name. She told me.”
Luz let out a low chuckle and shook her head. “I’m in, if your dad’s cooking.”
“As always. Any special requests?”
“He made a beef-and-onion dish once that was out of this world.”
“Turner Steak.” I nodded. It was a family favorite: slow-braised beef, mushrooms, and onions in a rich brown gravy, made with love and served over a mound of fragrant white rice. Total comfort food.
“Or enchiladas—you know, your Dad’s gotten really good at them. Or anything, really.”
“You got it.”
“Okay, now my turn to ask a favor of you.”
I looked at her, surprised. Luz rarely asked favors of anyone. “Name it.”
“It sounds silly, but . . . would you and Landon be up for going out with me and Victor?”
The Last Curtain Call Page 7