The Last Curtain Call

by Juliet Blackwell

  “It’s a little hard to explain. I thought I saw something when I was down there in the plenum.”

  “A ghost? Mateo and I saw the Wurlitzer organ come up, but I figured that could have been an electrical glitch, perhaps. Do you think it was supernatural?”

  “Yes, but believe it or not, ghosts weren’t the scary part.”

  “But something scared you.”

  I nodded. “Something . . . something happened. I had a kind of vision. I thought I saw something that had to do with how Hildy died.”

  “Hildy, our attic ghost? What does she have to do with the Crockett Theatre?”

  “From what I’ve pieced together, she was having an affair with Jimmy Delucci, the original owner of the theater. He was married, but Hildy had a child by him. I think he tried to leave something to her, maybe part of his fortune or the theater itself. She said he promised to take care of her and her child.”

  “But she died?”

  “According to the papers, she killed Jimmy during an argument, and then turned the knife on herself. But in the vision I just had, it was Jimmy’s brother, William, who murdered them both when he found out about the will.”

  Landon pondered for a moment. “Poor thing. What happened to the child?”

  “I don’t have any idea. This all happened nearly a century ago, so even if she had lived a long life I doubt she’d be able to tell us anything, even assuming I could track her down. All I have is the name Darlene.”

  We pulled up in front of my dad’s house. The garden was in full bloom, a little wild and overgrown but welcoming, with lemon, peach, and nectarine trees laden with fruit, showy blue lilies of the Nile, and bushes of Mexican marigolds, rosemary, and lavender lining the walkway.

  And then we walked into a kitchen smelling of roasting chicken and potatoes. I was so lucky.

  “Here’s the deal,” Dad said as we all sat down to eat, after Landon and I had showered off the dust from the Crockett. “Stan and I went over the numbers, and some things aren’t making sense.”

  Our eyes met, and I knew what he was thinking.

  It didn’t look like there had been millions already poured into the Crockett. Avery Builders was pricier than Turner Construction, but still . . . People unfamiliar with building sites often didn’t understand where the money went, but Dad and I sure did—permits, architectural drawings, invisible things like foundation work, electrical, and plumbing.

  But at the Crockett Theatre, other than the foundation work and some basic plumbing, it didn’t appear that enough had been done to justify the time and money spent so far.

  “Could Josh Avery somehow have been milking this project for his own gain?” I wondered aloud.

  “I thought you liked him,” said Dad.

  “I do. But when it comes down to it, I don’t know him all that well, and like you say, the project seems overrun with costs. He did mention some mysterious no-show positions . . . The other obvious culprit would be the consortium itself.”

  “I checked out their financials before giving the whole thing my go-ahead,” said Stan. “But that was based on the information and documents they gave me. It would have been easy enough for Xerxes to make things look good on paper.”

  “But why would they want to spend a lot of money on the project in the first place?” asked Landon.

  “So far most of the project has used city funds, or at least matching funds, so they haven’t put all that much into it,” said Stan. “And they bought the place for only ten dollars from the city.”

  “Ten dollars?” said Caleb. “I wanna buy a cool old theater for ten dollars.”

  “It was with the agreement that they would take on the multimillion-dollar renovation, however,” said Stan.

  “There’s always a catch,” said Caleb.

  “Were there any outs to that agreement?” I asked Stan.

  “Only if there are ‘unreasonable delays and/or cost incursions,’ or if the building was found to be ‘beyond reasonable repair.’”

  “What constitutes ‘reasonable’ and ‘unreasonable’?” Landon asked.

  Stan shook his head. “That’s not spelled out.”

  I thought back to my discussion with Renata at the permit department. Sometimes the city wouldn’t allow a property owner to destroy a historic building, so the owner would allow the roof to rot—or actively sabotage it—until the building was ruined beyond repair. After which, the building was considered a hazard and the owners were granted permission to demolish it.

  “So if they wanted to delay things sufficiently, and to run up the cost . . . what’s the ultimate goal?” I asked. “To tear it down?”

  “Or cash in on the land, like in Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” said Caleb around a mouthful of chicken.

  “I haven’t seen that one for a long time,” I said. “Remind me.”

  “In the movie aren’t they, like, buying up land that becomes valuable so they can sell it for the freeways or whatever? It’s like sitting on oil, or gold, or whatever. Same deal in that movie Chinatown—about water, I think?”

  “You’re becoming quite the film buff, Caleb,” said Dad. “How about going to class or studying every now and then?”

  We all laughed and the conversation moved on to Caleb starting college at UC Santa Cruz in the fall, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the Crockett.

  What was more valuable than oil or gold in these parts? Land. San Francisco was a thriving city located on a relatively tiny thumb of land, with no room to expand. City lots had become unbelievably precious, even in formerly run-down parts of town.

  After dinner I sat at my computer to check into the “space guy” who had wanted to buy the entire city block. How much had he been willing to pay? I found a few references to a billionaire who had made a bid, but none mentioned a dollar amount. Still, the fellow had enough money to try to build his own personal rocket to the moon, so I imagined it was a tidy sum.

  While online I checked the link to the eBay ad the Doctor had sent. The seller’s handle was Cocoapuffs24987. The parts were still for sale and without many bids—who wanted old plumbing fixtures?—so I bid on them and sent a personal message, asking whether the seller knew where the items came from.

  Also in my e-mail was a message from Trish with links to articles from the Oakland Tribune’s searchable archives, with the same article that Lorraine Delucci had shown me, plus a few variations. But the upshot was the same: One Hildy Hildecott, her profession listed as “starlet,” age twenty-nine, had stabbed to death her married lover and then turned the knife on herself, at a gentleman’s club near Lake Merritt “following a night on the town in San Francisco,” on one bloody September night in 1924. One article stated that the “lovers’” bodies were found by none other than William Delucci, brother of the deceased, who was said to have stopped by the club to share a late-night brandy with Jimmy Delucci.

  Brother, and murderer, of the deceased.

  Their deaths had not occurred in my new house, and yet Hildy was lingering in the attic, haunting me. Was she simply attached to her dresses, or was there something more?

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Days passed, and it was a joy to really get to know the nooks and crannies of the Crockett Theatre, cleaning up and getting our hands dirty.

  I called all the squatters for whom I had numbers; none picked up, but I left messages that there was temporary work for them if they were interested in helping with the cleanup.

  I found Tierney at the tattoo parlor and once again begged off of getting a tattoo, even a little one, but asked her to spread the word to the others in case they wanted jobs. Most seemed to have moved out of the theater once my crew and I showed up with equipment—the racket of compressors has a way of clearing the area—but I worried about where they might have gone.

  Meanwhile, Luz’s colleague who dealt with homelessness a
nd affordable housing also agreed to meet with them to discuss options, and came to the theater laden down with brochures and application forms.

  I never heard back from most of the squatters, but Alyx, Liam, Mitch, and Tierney showed up, along with a few others. Tierney was especially helpful because she was so petite and thus able to get into the plenum and move around much more easily than I could. We set up a bucket brigade. Tierney filled buckets with trash and handed them up through the cast-iron openings, and they were then passed hand to hand to a staging area on the ample balcony landing. There the buckets were dumped and the contents sorted into piles of like items: candy and food wrappers; smoking-related items such as cigarette packs, matchbooks, cigarette holders, an old pipe, and tobacco pouches; twine and nails and tools and building-related items; newspapers, playbills, and magazines; other miscellaneous papers.

  It was this last category that most interested me, but there was no last will and testament to be found.

  When Tierney declared the crawl space to be “trash-free,” I climbed in to take a look. She had done an excellent job. It was indeed completely trash-free.

  Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Jimmy Delucci and Hildy Hildecott hadn’t passed their last night together here in the balcony. Maybe Jimmy hadn’t named Hildy his heir and dropped the darned will and then was unable to find it. After all, it sounded a bit incredible when I put it out there like that.

  Once we finished with the plenum clean out, I ordered pizzas for all my squatter employees, and we gathered on the balcony landing to eat together.

  “Don’t give up altogether, Liam,” I heard Tierney say as I set the pizzas down in the middle of the circle. With Isadora gone, Tierney seemed to have stepped into the “house mom” position, even though this house had dispersed. She was young and soft-spoken, but nonetheless the others tended to fall quiet and listen when she addressed them. “Remember that one Crockett Caretaker guy? He found a place right around the corner?”

  “That’s true,” said Alyx as he helped himself to a second slice of mushroom-and-pepperoni pizza. “Who knew the city paid so much?”

  “Is he getting assistance from the city to pay for the apartment?” I asked.

  “What?” said Alyx. “No, like, he works for the city.”

  “The city of San Francisco?” I asked.

  Alyx exchanged looks with Liam, as if to say, “She’s a dim one, this one.”

  Tierney leaned forward and spoke gently. “Yes, Mel? He works for the city of San Francisco? He’s, like, in their records department?”

  “Are you talking about Baldwin?” I asked.

  They nodded.

  “You’re right, then.” I thought back to Coco’s classic Victorian apartment building, with its paneled entry decorated with a chandelier and a flower arrangement. Baldwin had mentioned he had just moved in. “That’s an awfully nice place for someone on a city salary.”

  “Maybe he has family money,” said Mitch. “In fact . . . I wanted to tell you guys that my family has suggested maybe buying a place in Oakland or someplace a little cheaper, and maybe we could live together there and see if we could make it work.”

  They spoke excitedly about the possibilities. It seemed the new situation would include paying some rent, but Mitch’s family sounded willing to subsidize them at least in part. That would be a nice solution, at least for some of the squatters.

  “Okay, guys,” I said as we finished up. “This pizza is actually a bribe: Will you finally tell me? How did you slip in and out of the theater all this time?”

  They exchanged looks, and Alyx shrugged.

  “The tunnels down below, with the cisterns.”

  “They lead somewhere?” I asked.

  “They’re connected to the tattoo shop,” said Tierney. “First time I wandered through and wound up in this theater, I seriously thought I was hallucinating.”

  “There’s also a connection to the donut shop,” said Mitch.

  “They both have access? That’s . . . interesting.” And it was something that should be addressed. As fun as secret entrances and tunnels could be, they could also pose a significant public-health risk.

  “But you locked everything up, right?” asked Liam.

  “How do you mean?” I asked.

  “Somebody put locks on all the doors down there?” said Tierney. “We assumed it was you?”

  “It wasn’t me, as a matter of fact. I’ll check it out. But one other thing I wanted to mention before you all leave for the day,” I continued. “I was thinking, now that the main theater is pretty well cleaned up, would you like to use it for a memorial service for Isadora? You could invite any other friends and family.”

  “That would be awesome,” said Tierney. “I think Isadora would really like something like that. Probably not her whole family, but I’m sure Ringo would like to join us.”

  “I’d like to come, as well, if it’s appropriate,” I said. “I know I barely met her, but I feel I know Isadora in some important ways. And I am so sorry for her loss.”

  In fact, I still saw Isadora dancing onstage, especially toward the end of the day when there were fewer people left in the building. Often I stopped to watch, and several times I tried communicating with her, but she would not pause in her dance of joy.

  Speaking now of Isadora, it dawned on me: If Isadora had found a will in the plenum and realized what it was, of course it wouldn’t still be in the plenum.

  Also . . . why had she been so committed to showing it to Skeet?

  It was late. I closed up the theater behind everyone and locked the back door. Then I went to the open door of the security trailer. Skeet was on duty tonight.

  “Skeet?” I called out as I approached.

  “Well, hello there, Mel. How are things going?”

  “The cleanup has gone well so far. We don’t have any of the big equipment here yet, but the scaffolding is scheduled to be delivered and set up tomorrow, so we ought to start kicking up a real racket. I apologize in advance.”

  He smiled. “There’s an old saying about breaking a few eggs to make an omelet that comes to mind.”

  “True.”

  “Coffee?” he asked. “Would you like to come in?”

  “No coffee, thanks. But I wanted to ask you something.”

  “Shoot.”

  “The other day when I stopped by . . . why did you change your tone suddenly and ask me to leave? It seemed like you had received a phone call that put you on edge.”

  He shrugged. “Sorry about that. It was that Alan Peterson guy, asking questions, trying to get to the Xerxes group, and refusing to believe that I have to respect the nondisclosure agreement I signed. That man treads on my last nerve.”

  “He does have a way about him, I agree.”

  “Anyway, I apologize. I think I was just tired; I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”

  “No worries. Hey, you mentioned that your mother was an orphan, from Oakland. Did she ever mention her own mother?”

  Skeet shook his head. “She was too young when her mom died, didn’t remember anything. She got taken in by a family over there, in Oakland, the family in the house where her mother had rented a room. She used to talk about that house, said it was special, that she always felt drawn to it.”

  “Do you know the address?”

  He shook his head. “Can’t say that I do. She took me over there one time when I was a kid, though.”

  “Do you remember anything about it? What did it look like?”

  “It was a big old house, with a redwood in front, old garage out back. Not far from the Grand Lake Theatre, as a matter of fact.” He smiled. “I remember after, we went to a matinee. It was a real nice day. That’s why I still like to take my grandkids out, spend time with them; childhood goes by too fast, and those are the memories we treasure.”

  “So true.
Skeet, what was your mother’s name?”

  “Darlene. Darlene Henley was her married name.”

  “And her maiden name?”

  “Hildecott.”

  * * *

  * * *

  I didn’t tell Skeet about what I had put together, about his grandmother Hildy, and the possibility that he should, in fact, be the owner of the Crockett Theatre, over which he had been standing guard for so many months. I wasn’t entirely sure I was right yet. Even if I could find the will, it would have to be authenticated, and even then there would probably be lawyers and judges involved.

  Landon had taken Dog for a walk in the Presidio and was supposed to pick me up at five, but texted to say he was stuck in traffic and running a little late. So I went back into the theater and proceeded to the ladies’ lounge.

  Isadora must have found that last will and testament in the plenum along with her candy-wrapper collection. I wondered if there was any way she had uncovered Skeet’s family connection to the Crockett, or if she simply trusted him to know what to do about her discovery of an old will. For all I knew she simply thought it was a fun piece of historical data to be displayed alongside her candy-wrapper collection or on the shelf with his Depression ware shards.

  Unless I could get her to talk to me, I doubted we’d ever know for sure.

  I made my way through the spectacular lobby, down the ugly pink hallway, to the mirrored vestibule that led to the ladies’ lounge.

  It looked rather sad and empty.

  We had cleaned up the mess that had been made by someone searching, I now believed, for the will, just as I was. The chaise longues and benches had been removed to be restored and reupholstered, and the old desk now sat out in the alley in a giveaway pile.

  I stared at the place where the wallpaper hung down, and the slogan “Affectations can be dangerous” had been painted directly onto the stained plaster and surrounded with paisley designs.

  As I ran my hands along the peeling wallpaper, I felt something not visible to the eye. I felt it with my fingertips, a very slight edge to something.