The Shape of Dread

by Marcia Muller

  “All right, you waited together at the bar. What time did Jim Fox leave with the woman he met?”

  “The…I guess while we were sitting there. I’m not sure.”

  “He wasn’t involved in going over the papers with Rob and Jay?”

  “…I don’t think so.”

  “How long were Rob and Jay together in the office?”

  “Not long. Maybe fifteen minutes.”

  “And what time did you drop Lisa at her apartment?”

  “Two-thirty or so. I know we were home by three.”

  I had run out of questions. Suddenly I wondered why I had even requested this interview. I cast about to make sure I had asked everything I needed to. “Did you see Tracy leave the club that night?”

  For some reason that bothered her. She turned back to the bar and began removing a cork from the corkscrew. “I watched her routine, of course.”

  “A number of people said she wasn’t at her best that night.”

  Kathy shrugged.

  “She also made a phone call before she left. Do you know anything about that?”

  “…No. All I remember is watching her routine from our usual table in the last row.”

  “And after that?”

  “After that she was gone. And that was it.” The words were firm and flat, but her body language told me she was lying.

  Kathy came away from the bar, set her glass on a coaster on the coffee table, but remained standing. “If that’s all,” she said, “I need to get ready for an appointment that I have in the city.”

  As she showed me out of her big, heavily mortgaged house, her step was lighter, as if she’d performed a difficult task and felt she’d acquitted herself well.

  I hadn’t eaten lunch, so I stopped at Sam’s on the Tiburon waterfront. The clear weather had enticed a few diners onto the outdoor deck, and I joined them, snuggling deep inside my heavy pea jacket. As I waited for my crab sandwich, I thought about Kathy Soriano’s evasiveness.

  She’d been relatively candid and forthcoming early in the interview, possibly because the questions I asked were more or less what she’d expected to hear. Then my revelation that it was Tracy, rather than Bobby Foster, who had stolen the company car had shaken her composure. And my question about whether she’d seen Tracy leave the club that night had led to her curtailing our conversation. I wondered about Kathy’s relationship with Tracy; she’d admitted to liking her, even though she wasn’t “too keen on women.” Was it possible they’d been friends? That Kathy knew more about what had happened than I’d initially suspected? Perhaps Larkey could shed some light on that.

  After I finished eating I called the club. Larkey was there, dealing with yet another representative of PG&E about the persistent gas leak. He told me he would be in a meeting with Rob Soriano and his tax accountant until three; why didn’t I come by at three-thirty? I said I would, and started back to the city. I wanted to stop once again at McIntyre’s former building; Kathy’s report of what the manager had told her about Lisa’s departure wasn’t particularly enlightening. Then I’d check the microfilm room at the library for the copy of the L.A. Times before keeping my appointment with Larkey.

  I was buzzed in as soon as I rang the manager’s apartment at the building on Pacific Avenue. The smell of baking bread from the store downstairs wafted up as I climbed to the second floor. It would be hell, I thought, to live over a bakery. The instant they took their wares from the oven in the morning, I’d be down there, my nose pressed to the glass, waiting for them to open.

  The manager looked as if she’d never so much as glanced at a croissant. She was extremely thin, clad in black jeans and a turtleneck that emphasized the spareness of her frame, and had milky white skin that pulled so tight over her cheekbones that it seemed nearly translucent. Her youthful clothing and long hairstyle belonged on a woman in her twenties or thirties; her eyes hinted at at least two more decades of experience. She came into the hallway rather than admit me to her apartment. As we spoke, she pulled off the browned and shriveled fronds of a half-dead Boston fern that hung from a skylight at the top of the stairs.

  Her name was Ms. Wilson, she said, and yes, she had been manager when Lisa McIntyre had lived there. No, she didn’t remember the woman from the comedy club who had come looking for Lisa after she’d moved out. That had been a bad year, and it was possible she had forgotten the visit. I braced myself for the story of the bad year-strangers have a way of confiding their tales of woe in me-but none was forthcoming. Ms. Wilson, it turned out, was a woman of few words.

  I said, “The woman who was looking for Lisa claims you said she ‘skipped out’ without giving notice and left a lot of her things behind.”

  The manager frowned. “I said no such thing-if I spoke to this person at all. Lisa didn’t give notice, but she left me a note saying to keep the security deposit to make up for the lost rent. The apartment was furnished; she took what was hers, left what belonged there. I wouldn’t call that skipping out, would you?”

  “No, certainly not. Did you keep the note?”

  “There was no need to.”

  “Did she leave a forwarding address for her mail?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t that strike you as odd?”

  She permitted herself a small smile; it seemed to cost her a fair amount of effort. “Most of what the tenants do strikes me as odd.”

  “Did Ms. McIntyre have many visitors while she lived here?”

  “I don’t know. I keep to myself and hope the tenants do the same.”

  “Did you see her move out, perhaps see someone helping her?”

  “No.”

  “And no one has inquired after her?”

  “No.”

  “Is it possible you’ve forgotten, seeing as it was a bad year?”

  She closed her left hand over the dead fronds she held, crushing them to dust. Her fingers were bony, their skin as pale and stretched as that of her face. “It wasn’t that bad a year. Now that I’ve had a few minutes to reflect on it, I’m sure no one came looking for her. That woman who says she did, whoever she is, is lying to you.”

  Someone sure was.

  There was a pay phone in the bakery downstairs, so I stopped and checked in with Rae at All Souls. When she came on the line, her voice was high-pitched with excitement.

  “Where the hell have you been?” she demanded. “I have this news for you, and you never call in!”

  “What is it?”

  “Your friend Johnny Hart got me the information you wanted on McIntyre from the food service workers’ union. Sharon, you were right! Listen to this: The Great American Laugh-in, 27333 Reseda Boulevard, Reseda. I’ve already checked; there’s no residential listing for her down there.”

  It was another comedy club; she hadn’t been able to stay away from them. Not Lisa McIntyre-Tracy Kostakos hiding behind Lisa’s identity.

  I rummaged for my pad and pencil. “Reseda. That’s-”

  “L.A. area, in the San Fernando Valley. From the airport, you take the 405 freeway north, then swing west on 101. Reseda Boulevard intersects it.”

  “Great. Call-”

  “USAir.”

  “And find out-”

  “They have flights leaving for LAX almost every hour. You’ve got a reservation on the three o’clock one, open return.”

  “I’ll need a-”

  “Car. It’s reserved. National.”

  “One more thing: I’ve got an appointment with Jay Larkey in half an hour. Cancel it, and tell him I’ll be in touch later.”

  “Will do.”

  “Rae, thanks. I’ll check back with you…whenever.”

  21

  Early rush-hour traffic crawled north from L.A. airport on Interstate 405, past industrial areas and old tracts of small, lookalike houses. After about ten miles the freeway began to climb into the hills, and names made fabled in the days when motion pictures were still a glamour industry began to appear: Sunset Boulevard, Mulholland Drive.r />
  I’d traveled this road many times before, en route from my parents’ home in San Diego to San Francisco and, earlier, Berkeley. Nothing much had changed over the years except the swelling number of cars. I kept wary eyes on the bumper of the van in front of me and tried to control my mounting tension.

  It now seemed that the theory I’d first dismissed as very shaky had at least some basis in reality. Tracy had gone to the cottage on the Napa River. Lisa had later joined her there. Perhaps the two of them had been alone, perhaps there had been a third party. But the end results had been Lisa’s death by gunshot and Tracy’s flight and assumption of Lisa’s identity.

  She’d come to the Los Angeles area, a good place for a young woman to lose herself. Since she had been a waitress before Larkey gave her her chance at performing, it had been easy for her also to assume Lisa’s occupation. But she’d made the mistake that most people who attempt to disappear do: she hadn’t totally disassociated herself from her prior life. She hadn’t been able to keep away from the comedy clubs.

  I was satisfied with those simple facts, but there were others that still didn’t fit. The stolen car. The premeditated nature of Lisa’s murder. The faked kidnapping. Tracy allowing her friend Bobby to be convicted of a crime he didn’t commit. The phone calls to her mother, after nearly two years’ silence. And the motive for it all…

  I would find that out soon, and when I did-

  The brake lights on the van in front of me flared. I jammed my foot down hard on the pedal. The car-a low-budget Japanese import-shuddered to a stop inches from the van’s bumper. I restarted it and crept up the grade in pace with the rest of the traffic.

  At the point in a case when assorted facts start to form a more or less understandable pattern, I usually feel a thrill of excitement. But now I felt only a strung-out tension and queasiness in my stomach-a dread of what I would find out. A dread of what additional horrors I would have to offer up to George.

  He didn’t deserve for his daughter to be embroiled in such a mess. Neither did Laura. True, George had been a “fondly absent” father; true, Laura had been a cold mother. But they had loved Tracy. Whatever I was about to find out was guaranteed to be bad, perhaps more than even George could bear, and certainly enough to topple Laura’s precariously balanced sanity.

  And bad for you, too, my all-too-truthful inner voice told me. Disastrous for this new relationship-the first that’s promised to matter in a long time-for you to be the one who blows it all wide open. You don’t deserve that.

  But Bobby Foster didn’t deserve to die, either.

  My stomach spasmed. I gripped the steering wheel harder, forcing down the queasiness.

  Near Sherman Oaks the interstate dipped down into the San Fernando Valley and crossed the Ventura Freeway. Traffic slowed close to a standstill on the westbound access ramp, then speeded up after it completed the merge. The exit for Reseda Boulevard, according to my map, was only about four miles beyond the interchange. As I drove, I squinted into the glare of the setting sun, its red and orange and gold smeared across the car’s windshield, all but obscuring what lay ahead of me. By the time I coasted off the freeway and turned north, my eyes had begun to smart.

  The boulevard was a wide one, lined at first with stores and restaurants and gas stations. Farther on, I came upon a vast area of apartment buildings: two- and three-storied stucco with the obligatory tiny lawns and palm trees, arranged around courtyards containing the obligatory tiny swimming pool and more palm trees. Many of their balconies overlooked the boulevard; they were furnished with lounge chairs from which tenants could view the passing cars, and potted plants that had somehow adapted to breathing exhaust fumes. Weber barbecues and hibachis stood as mute testimony to the good life.

  Farther on, in Reseda proper, business establishments regained prominence. I checked the address Rae had given me and began watching for The Great American Laugh-in. It appeared on the left, between a Mexican restaurant and a shoe store. Parking was plentiful; I pulled into a metered space directly across the street.

  Like Café Comedie, the club had a colorful façade-yellow, green, and orange-but it gave off a less sophisticated aura, as if its relative proximity to Disneyland had caused it to be exposed to too strong a dose of sunny, cloying fun. A former storefront, its blacked-out windows were painted with a barrage of balloonlike happy faces. As I crossed the street, I saw that twin clowns on either panel of the double entry pointed jovially at the doorhandles. I made a sour face at the clown on the left as I stepped into the dimly lit lobby.

  Plywood cutouts of more clowns greeted me: one pointed the way to the checkroom, another to a door marked RESTROOMS; a third had a mechanical arm that semaphored toward the club proper. I went that way, feeling the breeze from the arm’s whirling. The large room’s arrangement was also similar to that at Café Comedie, except the bar ran along the right-hand wall.

  A woman’s husky voice said, “We don’t open until six, ma’am.”

  It was only a little after five now. “Then what’s he doing on the job so early?” I motioned at the clown.

  The woman laughed. She was perched on a stool at the end of the bar, a calculator and stack of order forms in front of her, and wore a costume that made her resemble Ronald McDonald. “Witch is broken. Son of a bitch never stops flailing around. Like a lot of men I know.”

  I smiled companionably and took a seat two stools down from her. “I’ve known a few of those, too.”

  “Seems all some of them can do these days. I’ve got one at home-can’t keep a job, can’t cook, won’t dirty his hands housecleaning. I ask you-why do I keep him?”

  “Well…”

  “Yeah. That’s exactly why I keep him. Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but I really can’t serve you until six.”

  “I’m not a customer.” I never knew how to play situations like that until I saw who I’d be dealing with. This woman appeared hardheaded and fairly streetwise, so I decided to play it straight-up to a point.

  When I placed my identification on the bar beside her, her eyes became knowing and wary. “Private cop, huh? What’s Bart done now?”

  “It’s not Bart I’m looking for-whoever he is. It’s Lisa McIntyre.”

  “What’s she done?”

  “Nothing so bad.” The trick was to give her an acceptable story-certainly not the old ploy about a long-lost relative leaving a fortune-that would compel her to reveal “Lisa’s” whereabouts. I bided my time until I could get a better handle on what would work with this woman. “Your name is…?”

  “Annette Dowdall. I’m manager and bartender.”

  “Does Lisa still work here?”

  “Who says she ever did?”

  “Her records with the union. And you asked what she’s done, so you must know her.”

  Ms. Dowdall digested that, nodded slightly.

  “You happy with Lisa’s work?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “She’s kind of a ditz. Forgets to return change, spills drinks, breaks glasses. But the customers like her. I like her.”

  “You wouldn’t want to lose her, then.”

  “No, of course not. Look-what’s with Lisa?”

  “As I said before, nothing so bad. She skipped out owing back rent on her apartment in San Francisco a couple of years ago. Somebody from the building saw her down here and told the management. They had me run a check.”

  “So what do they want-just the rent?”

  “That and the storage costs on all the stuff she left behind.”

  “She left her stuff there? That’s something!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The poor kid can’t get it together to buy anything. Not that it would fit in that studio-” She got up abruptly and went around the bar. “Look, you want a drink or something?”

  “I thought you couldn’t serve me until six.”

  She grinned. “I can’t serve customers until six.”

  “In that case, white wine, please.”

  She
poured the wine and a Bud for herself, then came back around the bar. “Look,” she said, “Lisa’s a nice kid. She doesn’t have much money, certainly not enough for that rent and storage. Can’t you just tell them you couldn’t find her?”

  I shook my head. “There’s no point in that. They’d only hire somebody else, who might not be as pleasant with her as I would.”

  Ms. Dowdall still looked doubtful.

  “I won’t be rough on Lisa,” I added. “And frankly, I think my client will arrange for her to pay the debt in installments. I suspect he’s really more interested in getting her things out of storage than anything else. If I take him Lisa’s check for part of the storage fee and her written permission to dispose of what she left, I think he’ll probably forgive the rent.”

  She thought about that while I sipped my wine. Finally she said, “I’d just hate to see the kid get in trouble.”

  “You seem fond of her.”

  She shrugged and poured the rest of the bottle of beer into her glass. “It’s more I feel sorry for her. Lisa’s kind of pathetic, if you know what I mean.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Well, she doesn’t have any friends that I know of, and she never even tries to make some. She just comes to work and then runs home to her wretched little studio-I know it is, because I drove her home one time when she wasn’t feeling so good, and I guess she thought she had to ask me in. Sometimes she hangs around here on her nights off and watches the stand-up acts, kind of wistfullike. I think it’s that she wants to be a comedian, but she knows she hasn’t got what it takes, so she just sort of hovers on the fringes.”

  What made her wistful, I thought, was that she knew she was good and could never perform again.

  Annette Dowdall frowned, picking at the label on the empty beer bottle. “There’s something not right about Lisa.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s not that she’s a loner. She’s lonely. And every now and then I get the feeling she’s scared.”

  “Of what, do you think?”