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

by Michaela Thompson

  “What did he say?”

  She took a deep breath. “He told me you’ve gotten very strange ideas about him. He said you’ve misinterpreted some of his business dealings, and you’re going to get him in a lot of trouble.”

  It wasn’t that Richard ever made mistakes— only that other, inferior beings didn’t understand him. But could I blame him, really, for wanting to maintain his image with Candace? “I don’t think I misinterpreted anything,” I said carefully. “I saw the proof. Your father took a bribe. He didn’t even deny it when I confronted him.”

  “He told me that, too. He”— she started to sniffle— “he said he knew it looked bad, but it was business and what he did wasn’t anything unusual.”

  “That’s probably true. Do you think it’s all right, since it’s common practice?”

  “Oh, Mother—” she began to cry in earnest. “Please don’t expose him. I know he won’t do it again. He promised he wouldn’t. Please.” Shaking with sobs, she buried her face in her hands.

  It was worse than I had imagined. I had assumed Candace would be stiff and accusing. I never thought she’d plead with me. And here was the insidious part. If I did what she wanted this time, maybe she’d feel differently about me from now on. I crossed the room and stroked the bent blonde head. How old had she been the last time I had done this? Ten? Twelve?

  “The bribe isn’t even the worst,” I said. “You know, Larry Hawkins died, and another man has died since. I’m afraid your father may be mixed up in that too, somehow.”

  She shuddered and shook my hand away. “That’s just crazy!” she protested, sounding strangled with tears.

  “It isn’t crazy. Don’t say that to me.”

  She looked up, her face blotched with red. “Why shouldn’t I say it? How do you think you’ve been acting? This whole thing is totally insane!”

  I turned my back on her and walked to the window. It looked out on a magnolia tree with large, slippery-looking, dark-green leaves. I let the echoes of her voice die, in the room and in my head, before I spoke. “I’m having a relationship with a— a much younger man. His name is Andrew Baffrey, and he’s the editor of the People’s Times. I’m telling you because you may hear it elsewhere.”

  “Great.” The syllable was filled with distress, but not surprise. Richard had probably preceded me with that news, too.

  “I wanted you to know.”

  “Thanks a lot.” Candace’s voice was scathing. “On top of everything else that’s fabulous, Mother! What am I supposed to do, congratulate you on how far you’ll go to get even with Daddy? What’s next? Are you going to go with this guy to his senior prom?”

  “Shut up!” I hadn’t known I was going to shout. “I’m trying to treat you like an adult, and you’re acting like a teenage idiot. I will not be tyrannized by you, Candace, or by your father, or by anyone else. Perhaps you don’t realize it, but I love you, and…” All of a sudden, I had run out of things to say. I sat back down on the bed, biting my lip, not looking at her.

  She didn’t make a sound. Her crying had stopped, and I didn’t even know if she was breathing. After a minute or two, almost inaudibly, she said, “OK, Mother.”

  My throat was tight. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not sure. Just OK.”

  “Candace, I’ve been so frightened . . .”I knew I’d better not go on. She looked shaken, and desperately unhappy. Confidences would have to wait.

  “You know I don’t want you to do this to Daddy,” she said.

  “And you know I believe I have to.”

  She nodded bleakly. I walked to the door, and she followed me. I turned to her and rested the palm of my hand against her face. “The next few days are going to be difficult,” I said.

  Her eyes filled with tears. I held her for a moment, and felt the brief pressure of her arms around me. Then I kissed her on the cheek and walked out the door.

  Something momentous had happened. My chest felt swollen, about to burst. Unwilling to drive away yet, I walked a few blocks under the dripping trees. At least she hadn’t told me she would never forgive me. At least she had put her arms around me when we said good-bye. I returned to the car for the long drive back to San Francisco.

  Thirty

  The return-trip traffic was ferocious, and the afternoon was waning by the time I reached the Times. I hoped the Corelli issue was on the streets and Andrew was ready to play the last act in our too exciting drama. I heard phones ringing before I walked into the office, and the first thing I saw was a frazzled-looking Betsy O’Shea, her red hair wilder than ever. She had the phone receiver tucked between her ear and shoulder while both hands searched through one of her desk drawers. Several of the buttons on her phone were blinking, indicating other callers on hold.

  “Sorry, I can’t seem to locate it right now,” she was saying. “Sure, I’ll call as soon as I do. Bye.” Putting down the receiver, she said, “What a time to call about a restaurant review, for God’s sake.”

  “Looks like you’re busy.”

  She indicated the blinking lights. “It’s been this way all day. The Corelli story really lit up the skies. The wire services picked it up, and it may be on Walter Cronkite, too.”

  “Great for the paper.”

  “Fantastic. We may break even this issue.” She punched a button and said, “Times.”

  A celebratory atmosphere prevailed in the newsroom. Two gallon jugs of wine, one red and one white, sat on a desk, along with part of a loaf of sourdough and some hacked-looking cheese. Members of the staff were standing around drinking wine out of coffee mugs and talking animatedly. In one group, a young woman read aloud from one of the daily papers while her companions laughed uproariously at every sentence. “They completely botched it,” she crowed as she finished the story.

  The one element missing from the happy scene was the triumphant editor himself. Andrew was nowhere in sight. I found his office empty, and after waiting awkwardly to one side for a few minutes in case he’d gone to the bathroom I returned to Betsy in the outer office.

  When I asked, she pounded her forehead with her fist. “How dumb can I be? It’s these damn phones. I completely forgot to tell you he went to your place.”

  I felt sick. “My place? Why? How long ago?”

  She screwed her eyes closed. “Let’s see— twenty minutes ago, maybe? He said something about not being able to get you on the phone and making a swing by there to check things out. I thought maybe he wanted to bring you back to the party.” Her eyes popped open. “Sorry I forgot.”

  I was already out the door and halfway to the elevator before she could say, “Hey, Maggie! Is everything all right?” and as I leaned on the button I felt dizzy. Andrew would have no idea that Nick Fulton was likely to be watching my place, and even if I were Fulton’s preferred victim, Andrew would probably do in a pinch. I cursed impetuous youth, which led to actions like prancing off to check things out when you couldn’t get people on the phone. He’d known I was going to Stanford, hadn’t he? But the traffic had been bad and the trip had taken longer than it normally would. Besides which, dammit, he’d been worried about me. Now I was plenty worried about him.

  The drive to my place was a nightmare of clogged streets, exhaust fumes, and ever-more-vivid mental images of the various horrible fates that might have befallen Andrew. When I finally reached Lake Street it seemed, after the cataclysms of my imagination, surreally quiet and empty. There, indeed, was Andrew’s Volkswagen with its rear-bumper plea to boycott Gallo, parked a block from my house. There was my house itself, the picture of serenity in the twilight. I didn’t see Nick Fulton, the stocky man who’d driven the Lincoln, or anyone at all who looked like a possible member of Jane Malone’s goon squad.

  Strangely, perhaps, the appearance of normality agitated me all the more. I was blinking back tears by the time I parked in the driveway. Andrew couldn’t be in the house, since he had no key. He wasn’t in the front yard. In a frenzy of anxiety, I ran toward the back.


  It was dark enough by now for the park to be deserted. Tennis players, joggers, old men with their checkerboards, babies in strollers had all gone home to dinner. The blossoms of the almond tree outside my glassed-in back room were almost luminous in the deepening dusk. A petal floated down, lightly brushing my cheek as I tried to call Andrew’s name, didn’t manage it, cleared my throat and tried once more.

  No answer came, and I plunged across the narrow footpath and into the park proper. Wet grass brushed my ankles. I ran a few yards and called again.

  The first shot didn’t faze me. If I had time to think at all, I may have thought it was a car backfiring. It was the second, which knocked bark off a Douglas fir not far at all from where I stood, that enlightened me about what was happening. Instinctively, I turned to run. As the third shot sounded, I tripped over a root and fell full-length in the grass.

  I was dazed, winded, and not at all sure I wasn’t wounded as well. All I knew was that if Jane Malone herself were charging me with a red-hot revolver I couldn’t move, much less get up and run. I struggled for breath, blades of grass tickling my nostrils and ears, and in a few moments I heard running feet and Andrew’s voice calling, “Maggie!”

  He was bending over me, gibbering something about oh my God, where are you shot, and I managed to gasp, “Not shot.”

  He blotted his eyes on his sleeve and said, “It came from over there. I’ll go see,” and I didn’t have the wind to tell him not to be an idiot. Expecting every minute to hear more shots followed by his dying groans, I struggled up on one elbow. In fact, I heard nothing and shortly he returned to kneel beside me again.

  “Nobody there, but I found this beside a bush,” he said.

  The object in his palm looked, in the fading light, like a piece of wadded cloth or paper. I touched it. “What is it?”

  “A glove, I think. Let’s go in.”

  I could stand now, and he helped me totter to the door. The house had an air of neglect, as if it had stood empty for much longer than twenty-four hours. I lay on the sofa, and he turned on an end-table lamp and placed his find in the pool of light.

  It was a glove, crumpled into a ball, as if it had been wadded and carelessly thrust into the bottom of a pocket. Too bad, because good pigskin driving gloves were expensive. Richard had a pair like that. Candace gave them to him Christmas before last, right after he got the Porsche. Pigskin driving gloves, holes over the knuckles, and inside on the hem the initials RL stamped in gold. Yes. There were the initials.

  “That’s odd,” I said.

  “What’s odd?” Andrew sounded hoarse.

  “This glove looks like Richard’s. It even has his initials in it. See?”

  “Maybe that’s because it’s Richard’s glove,” he said.

  “It couldn’t be. Richard adored his gloves. He took exquisite care of them. Candace gave them to him. He would never…” I realized how ridiculous I must sound.

  “Maggie, Richard tried to kill you.” Andrew’s face had a peculiar, zealous intensity.

  “It wasn’t Richard. It was Nick Fulton.” I gave him a quick rundown of my adventures with Fulton and Jane Malone.

  When I finished, he said, “Still. Why would Nick Fulton have Richard’s glove? Richard shot at you. Face it.”

  Was I simply being perverse? “It’s completely unlike him to wad up his glove like that.”

  After a moment or two, Andrew stood up. “I’ll bet you could use a drink.”

  “Not to mention a bath.” He poured brandy and handed it to me, and I said, “What were you doing? Where were you when I got here?”

  He poured himself a drink and sat down. “We had incredible excitement over the Corelli story, you know? But all day long, Maggie, I swear there wasn’t a minute I wasn’t worried about you. I thought, there’s danger everywhere, and you were out there in it, and I kept wishing I’d had you come to the Times with me so I could keep tabs on you. I knew you’d gone to Stanford, but I kept calling here and there was no answer and I thought you should’ve been back. I kept thinking maybe you had gotten back and Richard had come over and done something to you, which”— he shot me a glance— “is exactly what I believe happened.”

  He took a swallow of his drink and went on, “Toward late afternoon I couldn’t stand it any longer, so I hopped in the car and came out here. Of course you weren’t here, but as long as I’d made the trip I got some wild-assed notion of checking things out, seeing if anybody was making suspicious moves. That’s what I was doing when I heard the shots. Somebody was making suspicious moves, but in a different part of the park.”

  “I guess we’re lucky neither of us got killed.”

  “We sure are.” He put his drink down and stood. “OK, Maggie. Now let’s take the damn glove, go to the police, and tell them about Richard.”

  Thirty-one

  It wasn’t easy, but I convinced Andrew that I had to have a bath before we went to the police. He followed me to the bedroom and leaned in the doorway while I wearily peeled off the black dress. I’d give it to Goodwill. I never wanted to wear it again.

  “I almost forgot to tell you. The scuttlebutt is that there’s a lead in the Corelli case,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Three old guys were sitting at Luigi’s drinking Chianti when the murder happened. One of them thinks he saw a man getting in a car at the end of the alley and driving away about that time. The only problem is, the other two don’t remember anything, and this old fellow has cataracts or something, so they’re not sure how good his information is.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “He doesn’t remember a make— just that it was big and blue.”

  Richard didn’t have access to any blue cars that I knew of. His agency car was black, and the Porsche was dark green. Anyway, why the hell was I thinking up excuses for Richard? I pulled on my salmon-colored peignoir. “I’m going to soak. Be with you in a little while.”

  When I sank into the tub, surrounded by cucumber-scented bubbles from Candace’s organic bath oil, I closed my eyes and tried to turn off my mind. The hot water felt as if it were dissolving me all the way down to my bones.

  In a few minutes, I was struggling across an alien landscape— crawling over dun-colored hills, clambering into creased valleys, then pulling myself up hills again. It was so difficult I almost cried with frustration. As far as I could see, there were more brown hills. Then I realized that the ground I was standing on wasn’t really earth. It had a bumpy, elastic texture— I woke with a start. The landscape I had been crawling over was Richard’s crumpled pigskin glove.

  The water was tepid. I shivered and got out, dried myself briskly, and put on boots, blue wool pants, a white turtleneck. Andrew was standing in the living room. “Ready to go?” he said when I walked in.

  I had no choice. “I have something to tell you.”

  He smiled. “Speak.”

  “I don’t believe Richard shot at me tonight. I think someone is trying to make things look bad for him. I can’t go to the police and accuse him of something I don’t believe he did.”

  Andrew’s face stiffened. “Why don’t you think he did it? What about the glove?”

  “The glove is the reason. Richard was very fond of those gloves, and he wouldn’t treat them like that. It’s against his nature.”

  “What about Larry? Do you think he killed Larry?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t believe he shot at me tonight, and I don’t believe he killed Larry. Somebody’s trying to frame him.”

  Andrew looked grim, remote. “I saw this coming. Saw it a mile off. Ever since we started this thing, you’ve shied away from believing Richard was guilty. You’d rush forward one step and fall back two. Do you admit it?”

  “No, I don’t. I was always perfectly willing—”

  “Why don’t you face facts? You were angry with Richard for leaving you and you wanted to make him sweat, and that’s all there was to it. You were never serious about the inve
stigation.”

  I had been threatened, shot at, abducted. I had discovered a dead body. I wasn’t serious about the investigation? “I’ve never been so serious about anything!”

  “Yet you won’t go to the police when you know Richard’s guilty.”

  “I don’t know he’s guilty! I won’t go because I don’t believe he killed anybody. The bribery, yes. Fine. But I don’t think Richard or anybody else should be wrongfully accused of murder.”

  “So what do you propose to do now?” His demeanor was elaborately polite.

  “I’m going to ask Richard about his gloves and see what his explanation is, and—”

  “Then you’ll have to do it by yourself!” Andrew exploded. “I’ve had enough kowtowing to Richard and asking his explanation for everything!”

  I retreated into frigidity. “If that’s the way you want it, fine. There’s no reason to continue discussing it.”

  He thrust his hands angrily into his jacket pockets and started for the door. He stopped once and threw me a bitter glance, then the door slammed and he was gone.

  I stood motionless in the living room, stunned by the intensity of our fight— how quickly it had sprung up, how hotly it had raged. I was also overcome by déjà vu. Not so long ago, Richard had stormed out. Now Andrew had done the same thing. I wondered if life consisted of playing the same scenes over and over, with different actors.

  I was stung by Andrew’s defection. Even considering the strain we’d been under, his response struck me as an overreaction. He had been my friend, my confidant, my lover, my co-investigator. Now he was so anxious to nail Richard that it all meant nothing. An unpleasant thought entered my head. Was he perhaps too anxious to nail Richard? I had only his word for where he was when the shooting was going on, only his word that he had found Richard’s glove in the park. He could’ve had it in his pocket the whole time.

  Andrew could have been working to frame Richard, to convince me that Richard killed Larry. Why? Maybe Andrew killed Larry himself. Andrew was in charge of the Times now. He and Larry hadn’t always gotten along. Maybe something boiled over that night, and …