Paper Phoenix: A Mystery of San Francisco in the '70s (A Classic Cozy--with Romance!)

by Michaela Thompson

  She shrugged. “I guess it will. I’ve more or less turned it over to Andrew Baffrey. That paper was Larry’s plaything, not mine.”

  In the downward curve of Susanna’s mouth, I read the bafflement and frustration of someone who has felt unfairly excluded. I could well imagine that Larry Hawkins hadn’t been an easy person to live with. Thanking her again, I turned to go, and as I walked to my car I could hear the children shouting, the dog barking in the backyard.

  Back home, over a sandwich, I looked at the papers Susanna had gathered for me. There was nothing I didn’t already know. As I closed the folder, feeling guilty once again that she had gone to the trouble, the phone rang.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gotten two phone calls in one day. I answered the kitchen extension. Again, the voice on the other end was unfamiliar, but this time it was male. “Mrs. Longstreet?”

  “Yes?”

  “Mrs. Longstreet, I have some advice for you. Are you listening?”

  The low, expressionless tone made my stomach tighten. “Who is this?”

  “Here’s the advice,” the voice went on. “Stay away from the People’s Times. If you don’t, there could be trouble.”

  The word “trouble” vibrated in my ear as I heard the receiver go down on the other end of the line. Although I knew the connection was broken I sputtered, “Just who the hell are you?” Nobody answered, so there was nothing left to do but hang up.

  Seven

  After three minutes of blind panic, I started to get angry. Only one person could be responsible for a sinister call telling me to stay away from the People’s Times, and that person was Richard. Obviously, he was having me followed.

  The thought infuriated me as I had rarely been infuriated. Richard had walked out, declared his independence of me and his indifference to my actions, but he wasn’t decent enough to leave me my privacy. I went to the living room and looked out the front window. The street was calm, looking almost bleached in the early-afternoon sun. A young woman passed, pushing a stroller. No cars with strangers slouched behind the wheel. No moving curtains in windows across the street.

  I went to the glassed-in back room. It was quiet, the only sound an occasional thwock! from the tennis courts in the park. Through the luxuriant blossoms of the almond tree I could see the wind-ruffled, greenish waters of Mountain Lake. There were thick clumps of bushes everywhere, tall fir trees, an open-fronted concrete-block structure where old men sat playing checkers. Lots of places to hide. Anybody could hide out there and watch.

  The creepy fear that made my hands perspire also fed my rage. I grabbed my purse and slammed out of the house.

  My anger was like a balloon, carrying me downtown. I sailed unimpeded through the traffic, constantly checking my rearview mirror to see if there was a suspicious vehicle behind me. It seemed only an instant after I left the house that I was pulling into the outrageously expensive parking lot down the street from Richard’s office.

  The Redevelopment Agency was located near the Civic Center, in a featureless gray building that could easily have been converted to a cell block. Every atrocity of modern design had been visited on the lobby— glaring fluorescent lights that transformed flesh to dead fish, Muzak, a supergraphic of jagged orange-and-red lightning on the wall. Under the supergraphic, looking even more doddery than when I had last seen him, stood Pop Lewis, the security-guard-cum-doorman.

  His hand touched the brim of his uniform cap, and he broke into a welcoming smile that revealed more gums than teeth to fill them. He greeted me with, “Mrs. Longstreet! Why haven’t I seen you around lately?”

  Wonderful. Pop’s refusal to turn up his hearing aid must have prevented his getting in on the office gossip about the divorce. Not waiting for an explanation, he pushed the button to call the elevator for me, then nattered on. “You know, Mrs. Longstreet, my wife never stops talking about those fruitcakes you give us at Christmas. She keeps bothering me about can’t I get her your recipe. You know—” The elevator slid open, and I entered gratefully in the full knowledge that Pop wasn’t half as impressed with my fruitcakes as he was with the hefty holiday check Richard had always written to go with them.

  The seventeenth floor looked exactly as it always had. The carpet was the same bastard combination of yellow and green, the walls still lined with drawings showing the neighborhoods Richard and his henchmen had knocked down or planned to. I walked around the corner to the door marked REDEVELOPMENT AGENCY in gold and, under that, in smaller letters, OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR.

  The receptionist was new and easily cowed, so it was only a few minutes before I was in Richard’s suite of offices facing Tabby, his secretary. Tabby was notable for her rhinestone-decorated harlequin glasses, bouffant hairdo, and years-long crush on Richard. She had never liked me. I heard relish in her voice when she said, sweetly, “Mr. Longstreet is in conference at the moment.”

  Tabby had always intimidated me. Now I realized that it no longer mattered whether she liked me or not. “Well, Tabby,” I said, my sweet tone matching hers, “you go tell Mr. Longstreet to get the hell out of conference, because I want to talk to him. It’s an emergency.”

  Her rhinestone-encircled eyes went blank for a moment. Then, with a look at once dignified and murderous, she got up, walked to the closed conference-room door, knocked lightly, and went in.

  Soon, she and Richard emerged. The shock of seeing him again nearly undercut my anger, and I felt my mouth go dry. I could tell by the set of his jaw that he was irritated. He glanced at me and said, “Hello, Maggie. Let’s go in here for a moment, shall we?”

  He was wearing a gray suit and a maroon and gray patterned tie. His hair was a little longer than he used to wear it, and his tan was deeper— probably from hours on the tennis court with his athletic young lady love. Even when tight with displeasure, as it was now, his long, lean face was handsome enough to decorate a carved medieval altarpiece. I had always been willing to forgive him a great deal because of his looks.

  As he ushered me into his private office he said, “This had better be important.”

  “It is.” Richard’s office was the same, too. The massive desk, the rubber tree in the redwood tub, the Picasso imitation that hid the wall safe, and the sweep of windows with an incomparable view of the city hadn’t changed. The only difference I noted was that my photograph was missing from the bookshelves, although Candace’s was still in place.

  “Well?” He neither sat nor offered me a chair.

  “I came to tell you, Richard, that you’d better call off your bloodhounds.”

  His eyes widened. “What?”

  My anger was returning now, giving me energy. “The detective, or whoever it is you’ve got following me. I want it stopped.”

  “Maggie, what are you talking about?” Richard’s tone was excessively patient, the voice he used with waiters when he sent a dish back to the kitchen at a restaurant.

  “I’m talking about the fact that someone is following me. I can’t imagine what you have to gain by this kind of harassment. Please call it off.”

  He spread his arms in an exasperated gesture of having nothing to hide. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never even considered having you followed.”

  Of course he would never admit it. I felt my face reddening. “Look. There’s no point in denying it. I know I’m being watched.”

  “You do? How do you know?” I saw patronizing pity in his eyes. His tone implied that he was dealing with a lunatic.

  “Because…” I began furiously, then stopped. If I answered his question, I’d have to tell him about my visit to the Times. Presumably, if he’d had somebody make the phone call he already knew of it, but I myself wasn’t ready to bring it out into the open yet. “Let’s just say I have good reason to think so,” I finished weakly.

  Now the patronizing air was stronger. “I’m quite sure you do,” he said. “But if someone is following you I’m not responsible. You said it yourself. What would I hav
e to gain?”

  “I don’t know.” I made my tone as frigid as I could, but I had lost ground and I knew it.

  Richard glanced at his watch. “You know, Maggie, if San Francisco is getting on your nerves, why don’t you consider getting away for a while? You could go back to Mazatlan. You liked Mazatlan, didn’t you? Or Greece. We never got to Greece. I could have Tabby make all the arrangements for you.”

  At this false solicitude, I felt a stirring of something more solid than anger. After a moment I identified it as pure, astringent, honest dislike. “I have no intention of leaving town, Richard,” I said. “If my presence is getting on your nerves, you go to Mazatlan. And in the meantime, if you’re lying and you have had someone watching me, I suggest you call him off before I contact the police.”

  I left him no time to reply and sailed out past the assiduously typing Tabby and down the hall to the elevator.

  The afternoon traffic was beginning to fill the streets, and the drive home seemed many times longer than the trip downtown had been. Sitting behind a bus, watching the traffic light ahead change to red once again, I felt my head begin to throb. Maybe it was impossible to get a foothold on the slick surface of Richard’s urbanity. He said he wasn’t having me watched. Even after being married to him for twenty years, I couldn’t tell if he was lying. A stronger throb went through my head, and I put it on his lengthening account. Seeing him again had been a mistake.

  When I got home I again looked around for unfamiliar cars or suspicious characters, but the only person in view was the Japanese gardener digging in a neighbor’s yard. I climbed wearily to the front door. Who would care if I visited the Times ? Only Richard. If Richard knew what I was up to, he would care, so Richard must be responsible for the phone call. I should get in touch with the cops. Put the cops on him, let them take care of it. I pictured myself explaining to the police that my husband, a distinguished political figure who played tennis with their bosses, was behind a threatening phone call to me. I pictured the police calling Richard to discuss it with him, and Richard explaining that I was a little bonkers but he’d try to see that they weren’t disturbed again.

  My head was worse. I kicked off my shoes and lay down on the couch, but I couldn’t rest. “There could be trouble,” the voice had said. I wouldn’t call the police, but there was something I would do. I got up to call Andrew Baffrey.

  Eight

  Andrew sounded surprised, but not displeased, to hear from me. “What can I do for you?”

  “It’s about what we discussed this morning. Something’s happened, and I wanted to ask you—”

  “Wait a second,” he broke in. “I don’t want to dazzle you with cloak-and-dagger tactics, but I’d rather not discuss this on the phone. I was just leaving. Would you like to meet me in a dark alley, or preferably your neighborhood bar, for a face-to-face conversation?”

  “There aren’t any bars in my neighborhood.”

  “Too bad for you. I live next door to one. Where do you live, anyway?”

  “Presidio Heights. Lake Street. Next to the park.”

  He laughed. “Anybody tries to put a bar in that neighborhood, the Planning Commission goes into special session to quash the idea. But never mind, here’s another suggestion. I have to stop by Susanna Hawkins’s, and then I was going to have an early dinner. Why don’t you meet me and we’ll grab a bite together?”

  It would beat a frozen spinach souffle. “Fine. Where?”

  “Have you ever been to the Food as Spiritual Healing Ashram Restaurant?”

  “The what?”

  “I thought not. You’ll love it. It’s run by Sufis, or Hare Krishnas, or some sect like that. The best thing about them is they give you lots of food cheap. It’s vegetarian. You don’t mind vegetarian, do you?”

  I didn’t mind vegetarian. The restaurant, a tiny hole in the wall near the intersection of Market and Castro streets, had a couple of fresh daisies on every table. Eating my way through a huge plateful of eggplant curry and brown rice that had been served by a shaven-headed Food as Spiritual Healing devotee, I was almost inclined to agree with the printed cardboard placard on the table: A FULL STOMACH; A HAPPY HEART; A SOARING SPIRIT. Certainly the ashram’s guru, whose blown-up photograph adorned all four walls, seemed to have eaten himself into a blissful state of benignity and tubbiness. “So what happened?” asked Andrew.

  I poured more chamomile tea. “After our conversation this morning, did you talk to Richard? Did you mention what I said to anybody at all?”

  He looked properly shocked and offended. “Of course not. I gave you my word, didn’t I? Off the record is off the record. Why?”

  I told him about the phone call and my subsequent visit to Richard, finishing, “He claims he isn’t having me watched, but if you didn’t tell him I came to the Times I can’t think of any other explanation.”

  Andrew sat back in his chair, frowning. “I don’t like this.”

  “Neither do I. Threatening phone calls are too much for me.”

  He swirled the tea in his teacup, staring at it as if he were going to read the stray chamomile blossoms in the bottom. “There’s another possible explanation.”

  “What?”

  He set the cup down. “Maybe you aren’t the one being watched. Maybe somebody’s watching the Times.”

  I considered the idea. “Then the person watching the Times would have to know me.”

  “Know you by sight, anyway. Maybe he’s an avid reader of the society pages.”

  I winced, thinking of myself squinting into the flashbulbs at a ribbon-cutting, the first night of a play, a charity ball. “Even if he did know me, why would he warn me to stay away? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “No. It doesn’t.” He picked up the cardboard placard and tapped it on the table in a nervous tattoo.

  The Indian music playing in the background sounded strange and off-key. The photographs of the beaming guru had begun to look a little sinister. “I wish…” I began, then stopped.

  “Wish what?”

  “Wish we knew what Larry’s story on Richard was about. That’s the only possible connection in all this.”

  Andrew sat slumped in his chair, still toying with the placard. A full stomach. A happy heart. A soaring spirit. I hoped I wasn’t getting indigestion. At last he reached into the pocket of his jeans, brought out a metal key ring with one key attached, and put it on the table. “Let’s go find out,” he said.

  It was a small, uninteresting-looking key. “What do you mean?”

  “This,” Andrew said, tapping the key with his finger, “is Larry’s key to the cabinet in his office. I just stopped by and picked it up from Susanna. You remember I told you I hadn’t gone through Larry’s private papers? That’s where they are.”

  “You think he kept the information on Richard there?”

  “It’s there if it’s anywhere. I hadn’t checked it out because— well, mainly because I didn’t have myself together enough to do it. Susanna had the only key. She’s been at the Times once since Larry died, but I didn’t get it from her then because I wasn’t there. She got hysterical and Betsy had to drive her home.”

  “I remember it well.” I told him about Susanna’s scene and her subsequent apology.

  “Poor Susanna. She hasn’t had an easy time.” He picked up the key, tossed it once, caught it. “What do you say? Do we go take a look?”

  I heard the voice on the telephone: Stay away from the People’s Times. If you don’t, there could be trouble. “Sure. Lead on.”

  He got up. “I’ll drive, and drop you back here afterward.”

  Folded into his Volkswagen, I shivered. The fog was rolling in, and it would be a damp, chilly night. I felt sad, cut off from everything that had been familiar and comfortable about my life. Other people were at home having a drink, eating dinner, watching the evening news. I was rattling through dark streets in a Volkswagen with an inadequate heating system, caught in a dim and threatening world of suicide, anonymous phon
e calls, locked cabinets. The glaring light from a gas station briefly illuminated Andrew’s face, and it seemed to me the face of the only friend I’d ever had. My nose was prickling. To keep myself from falling apart, I said, “How do you know Larry kept his private papers in the cabinet, if it was always locked? Maybe he kept drugs in there. Or— or pornography, or something.”

  “The pornography’s in a filing cabinet in the newsroom, and Larry had a strict rule about no drugs on the premises,” Andrew said. “Larry wasn’t much of a doper, and he didn’t want any dope hassles. In that cabinet he kept one of those dark red accordion-pleated folders. I’ve seen him lock it in there plenty of times. My impression was that it contained names, phone numbers, rough drafts, working notes, Xeroxes of documents, and stuff like that. He never left anything lying around.”

  I didn’t reply. A dark red folder stuffed with incriminating documents about Richard. There could be trouble.

  ***

  The Times offices were oppressively quiet. Andrew switched on lights as we entered, and I trailed after him to Larry’s office. Inside, there was a desk with books and papers stacked on either side of a manual typewriter, shelves along one wall. Behind the desk, two large windows. I walked over to them and looked down. No screens. Below, the alley where Larry had died was lost in blackness.

  “Let’s see, now.” Andrew’s voice was subdued. The cabinet was built into the bookshelves, and was closed with a padlock. Andrew’s hands shook as he tried to fit the key into it. “Damnit,” he muttered, wiping his hands on his jeans. He tried again, and this time I heard the tiny click as the key turned. He removed the lock and opened the door. “What have we here?” he said, peering inside. He didn’t speak for a moment, then stepped back, an indecipherable look on his face. He waved his hand toward the cabinet.

  I leaned forward. The cabinet’s interior was shadowy, but there was no doubt that it was empty.

  Nine