The Shape of Dread

by Marcia Muller

  “I’m not sure. Sometimes she seems to be…watching. Like she thinks somebody’s going to show up and…I don’t know. Not somebody like you, looking for back rent. Something more serious than that.”

  “Something bad in her past, perhaps. What do you know about her?”

  “Not much, other than her employment record, and I didn’t actually check it out. Her union card was in order, and waitresses in a place like this, they come and go, no big deal. But there was one thing….” She hesitated, still picking at the label.

  I took a sip of wine, giving her time to decide whether to trust me. My restraint paid off. She said, “There was this one day last August. She came on shift at six. We don’t do much business until later, so she was sitting here at the bar. The TV was on to the national news. I wasn’t watching it, I was doing paperwork. But she was, and all of a sudden she got very upset-gasped, went pale. I asked her what was wrong, but she wouldn’t tell me. And for the rest of her shift she acted like this was a funeral parlor, not a comedy club. I finally told her to go home early.”

  “You don’t recall anything about the newscast?”

  “No, when I’m working with figures, I more or less blank everything else out.”

  August was when Bobby Foster had been convicted and sentenced to die for Tracy’s so-called murder. The case had received national publicity because it was a no-body conviction. It sounded to me as if Tracy had heard about it on the news, been distressed, yet still not come forward.

  “Is…Lisa scheduled to work tonight?” I asked.

  Annette Dowdall shook her head.

  “Will you give me her address and phone number, then?”

  She hesitated a bit longer, then said, “She doesn’t have a phone-something about owing back bills and they won’t give her one till she pays up. But I guess it would be okay for you to go over there. You see how she lives, you’ll know it’s only right to ask them to go easy on her.” She took a cocktail napkin off a nearby stack and scribbled on it. “That’s right down the street-the Tropic Palms.”

  “Thanks.” I took the napkin. “Let me pay for my drink.”

  “No,” she said, “it’s on the house.”

  I thanked her again, said I was sure something could be worked out with Lisa, and went out into the gathering darkness.

  The Tropic Palms was one of the older and shabbier buildings in the residential strip I’d noticed earlier: two storied, fake Spanish, on the same side of the boulevard as the comedy club. Mailboxes honeycombed one wall of the entryway; a number of them appeared to have been broken into. A heavy wrought-iron lamp on a massive chain was suspended from the arched ceiling; its bulbs had burned out. The building had no buzzer system or security gate.

  I went through the archway into the courtyard. The lighted swimming pool lay in its center-a murky jade pebble. Floodlights illuminated the various tropical plantings; their brittle leaves shivered in the cold wind that gusted about the enclosed space. Rusted lounge furniture stood around the pool, skeletal in its wintertime abandonment.

  The apartment number written on the cocktail napkin was 209. There was a central staircase to the rear of the courtyard. I skirted the pool and climbed it. A sign at its top indicated that apartments 201-221 were to the left. I turned that way, the dread I’d felt on my drive to the valley worsening. By the time I arrived at 209 and pressed the doorbell, my heart was pounding.

  After a few seconds a voice called out for me to hang on. It was flat, dull-not much like the vibrant tones I remembered from Tracy’s videotapes. Of course she would have changed….

  The door opened and I came face to face with her.

  The woman before me was painfully thin. The bone structure of her heart-shaped face was more prominent than two years before, her cheeks hollowed. Her curly light-brown hair seemed to drag under its own lifeless weight. When she saw me, a stranger, she blinked and jerked her chin up.

  This was not Tracy Kostakos.

  It actually was Lisa McIntyre.

  22

  For a moment I just stared at her, my mouth agape. She frowned and took a step back, partially shielding her body with the door. I found my voice and said, “Lisa McIntyre?”

  She nodded warily.

  I reached into my bag for my identification, trying to fit this development into my previously conceived notions. And failing. Lisa was here, alive. But the Napa County coroner had skeletal remains that matched her dental records. Since those bones couldn’t be Lisa’s…

  I introduced myself and handed her my identification. She studied it as if it were in a foreign language, then thrust it back at me. “What’s this about?” she asked. Aside from a faint twang left over from her early years in Oklahoma, her voice was curiously without inflection.

  “Ms. Dowdall at the club gave me your address-” I began.

  “You saw Annette? Why would she…what do you want? I haven’t done anything.”

  The questions I’d rehearsed on the plane were no longer applicable; the scene I’d envisioned had failed to materialize. I said, “I’m working on the Bobby Foster case, for his attorney.”

  She stiffened. “Bobby…they sentenced him to death.”

  “There’s going to be an appeal. We’ve found evidence that proves he made a false confession. I’m talking to everyone who was at Café Comedie that night, so we can put together what really happened to Tracy Kostakos.”

  “I…I don’t know anything about that.”

  “You may know more than you realize. May I come in and talk with you?”

  She looked as if she would like nothing more than to slam the door, but then she shrugged and motioned for me to come inside. There was a listlessness in the gesture and a resignation in her brown eyes that told me that, given an unpleasant situation, Lisa would usually opt for the path of least resistance.

  The apartment was fully as dismal as Annette Dowdall had said. The room was not more than twelve by twelve; most of the floor space was taken up by an open and rumpled hide-a-bed. A kitchenette ran along one wall, its counter cluttered with an accumulation of dirty cups and glasses and frozen food trays; the half-open door to the bathroom revealed a litter of castoff clothing and towels. The tiny balcony overlooked its counterpart in the next building. A black-and-white TV with a snowy picture was tuned to a game show. Lisa went over and shut it off.

  I looked around for a place to sit, overwhelmed by the air of hopelessness trapped in the confined space. A rattan chair with a basket of dirty laundry on it stood next to the balcony door. Lisa said, “Just move that stuff off of there,” and went to close the door to the bathroom.

  I set the clothes basket on the floor and sat. Lisa faced me, her posture defensive, as if she expected me to remark on the apartment’s chaotic state. When I didn’t speak, she said, “I could make some coffee.”

  “I don’t want to put you to the trouble.”

  She nodded, clearly relieved. I suspected that to her, most things would be too much trouble. When she sat down on the edge of the unmade bed, she slumped forward, fingers splayed on her denim-covered thighs. For a moment I wondered if her apathy was genuine, or if she’d assumed it in an effort to appear unconcerned about the matter at hand. Then I decided that wasn’t important; a few questions would shake her out of it.

  I began innocuously enough. “You worked at Café Comedie how long?”

  “Six months, maybe.”

  “You like it there?”

  “It was okay.”

  “Was Jay Larkey a good boss to work for?”

  That got a reaction: a mere flicker of her eyelids, but the mention of his name had touched a nerve. “…He was okay.”

  “What about the other people who worked there?”

  “What about them?”

  “Did you enjoy working with them?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “You knew Bobby Foster?”

  “Pretty well.”

  “Marc Emmons?”

  “Yeah. He’s a nice gu
y.”

  “Tracy Kostakos?”

  She drew her hands together and pushed the fingers down between her knees. “I didn’t know her well at all. She was one of the…stars there. You know.”

  “I’m not sure I understand. From what I’ve seen, it’s a small club, and the comedians mingle with the other employees. Besides, Tracy was a waitress like you before Jay let her try her hand at stand-up.”

  Lisa’s mouth twisted bitterly. “Tracy was never just a waitress. I could tell that the first time I laid eyes on her.”

  “I see. Let’s go back to the night she vanished. Tell me everything you can remember about it.”

  She ran her tongue over her lower lip. “Is this really going to help Bobby?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “I want to help him. It’s just that…I don’t know anything about what happened. I went to work, waited tables like usual, and went home. It was just a normal night.”

  “I don’t think so, Lisa.”

  She looked down at her hands. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “For one thing, you and Jay had a confrontation in his office around closing time.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Kathy Soriano.”

  “God. Well, it wasn’t anything, not really. He was mad at me for screwing up some drink orders. He used to yell at me a lot. As far as I was concerned, that was a normal night.”

  “Except that Tracy disappeared. And after that night you never went back to the club, not even to pick up your paycheck.”

  She was silent, still looking down at where her fingers were trapped between her knees.

  “Lisa,” I said, “you left San Francisco because of something that happened at Café Comedie that night. Will you please tell me about it?”

  “That’s not true. I left town because I…wanted to. It didn’t have anything to do with…anything. Tracy got killed, and I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “I don’t think you’re sorry she got killed.”

  Now she raised her head, lips parted.

  I added, “I know about the character she based on you-Ginny the waitress. And I know how upset you were about it. And what went on between you and Tracy before that.”

  She compressed her lips and closed her eyes. It was a moment before she said, “Okay, I hated Tracy. She used me and made me feel…like some lab animal she’d experimented on. But that doesn’t mean I killed her.”

  “I’m not trying to say you did. But I think you know more about that night than you’re admitting. And the knowledge is scaring you.”

  She shook her head vehemently, eyes still closed.

  “Lisa, a skeleton has turned up in a remote place where Tracy used to go in Napa County. They’ve had some difficulty identifying it, but I think it will turn out to be Tracy’s.” Strange, I thought, that I felt a wrenching as I spoke the words. I supposed that in the back of my mind I’d harbored the unrealistic hope that I’d find George’s daughter and somehow things would work out-in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

  “Someone shot her,” I went on. “But it wasn’t Bobby. That means the person who killed her is still at large-and a danger to anyone who has the slightest knowledge of her murder. For your own sake, as well as Bobby’s, help me!”

  She squeezed her eyes more tightly shut, and tears slid down either cheek, forming symmetrical tracks. I remained silent. After a moment she leaned forward and rooted around on the floor for a Kleenex box, wiped her face with a tissue.

  “Okay,” she said heavily. “I guess I knew it would catch up with me someday. So I’ll tell you. But first you have to promise you won’t let him find out it was me that told.”

  “Who?”

  She shook her head. “Just promise.”

  “I do.”

  “Okay. The way it was, Bobby and I were friends, sort of. We talked a lot. That night I ran into him on my break, about eight-thirty. There’s a room in back where the employees put their stuff and hang out. Bobby was there. I could tell he was high-he’d been doing crack-and really upset. I asked him what was wrong, and he told me about…him and Tracy. Do you know about that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, he didn’t seem to realize why she’d done it, but I could guess she’d used him, just like me. It made me furious. She’d done this horrible thing to both of us. And everybody knew she was fucking Jay for what he could do for her career. And then there was Marc: she’d broken off with him, but whenever she wanted anything, all she had to do was whistle. Anyway, Bobby went back to work, and I sat there getting madder and madder. And then there was Tracy, the star, breezing in to do her routine.”

  “Did you confront her?”

  “Damned right I did! I told her what a cunt she was, and that I was really on to her now. And I said I was going to tell everybody-including Jay.” Lisa paused, head cocked to one side. “You know, I thought she was a tough one, but that really threw her. She started to cry. And that only made me more furious. Why should she cry, when she had everything? I stormed out of there and waited for the chance to talk to Jay.”

  “And did you?”

  “Not right away. He was busy. The Sorianos came in, first Kathy and then Rob. They met some people, investors in the real estate business, I think. I didn’t get to talk to Jay until nearly closing, in his office.”

  “And that was why you seemed upset to Kathy later on, when you were sitting at the bar.”

  “Upset? That’s mild. Jay totally freaked out.” Lisa’s voice grew hushed, the memory cowing her even now. “He demanded to know all sorts of things-when, how many times, you know. And then he started hurling stuff around the office. I was terrified, all I could think was, What if this guy just grabs me and rips me apart? I mean, my father used to beat me when I was a kid, and a couple of the guys I was with before I turned off men were pretty violent, but Jay-I never knew he had it in him.”

  I hadn’t suspected that, either.

  Lisa was watching me with worried eyes. “You see why you can’t tell him it was me that told. After I heard Tracy had disappeared, and about the kidnapping, I was so scared I couldn’t go back to the club. Because he knew that I knew-”

  I held up my hand to slow her down. “You think it was Jay who killed Tracy?”

  “Who else? He was so furious, so violent. And he knew where she was going that night.”

  “He knew she was going up to the Napa River?”

  “Uh-huh. The way it went, Kathy and I were sitting at the bar around closing, waiting for Rob. I guess she told you that. She’d offered me a ride home, since it was pouring. Jay came out of the office to get something from behind the bar and asked Kathy what she was still doing there. She told him she was waiting for Rob because she’d loaned her car to Tracy so she could go to the cottage. And right away Jay said, ‘The cottage on the river?’ So I know he knew-”

  “Wait a minute! Kathy loaned Tracy her car?”

  Lisa looked blank, the shock in my voice stemming her gush of words. “…Well, sure. Kathy said Tracy’d already called Marc and tried to borrow his car, but he’d said he needed it the next day.”

  “Let me get this straight. Kathy told me Rob’s assistant in the real estate business was with them that night, and that it was his car that was stolen off the lot that night. He testified to that at Bobby’s trial.”

  “I don’t know anything about any stolen car or any assistant. I’m just telling you what I heard.”

  “You didn’t follow the news stories on the case, hear about the stolen car that eventually turned up in the mountains with bloodstains inside it?”

  “I didn’t follow it at all. I didn’t want to know anything about it. It was only by chance that the TV at the club was on the day they sentenced Bobby, or I wouldn’t have known about that.”

  “What kind of a car did Kathy drive, do you recall?”

  “A Volvo, blue. I rode in it quite a few times, to the bus stop or home.”

&nbs
p; I didn’t know whether to believe her or not. It made no sense for Kathy to loan Tracy her car, then turn around and have Jim Fox report it stolen. I said, “Wasn’t loaning her car out of character for Kathy? She doesn’t strike me as a particularly generous woman.”

  Lisa shrugged. “Kathy liked Tracy. And I think she knew Tracy was going to make it big; when she did, Kathy wanted for them to be friends.” She paused, thoughtful. “Actually, Kathy’s not so bad. She came around to see me that week when I was afraid to go back to the club. I told her I wanted to get out of town and why. She said it was a good idea, on account of Jay not being too stable. And you know what? She gave me money. A thousand dollars and a plane ticket, so I could get started down here. She even drove me to the airport.”

  I considered that for a moment, balancing it against what Kathy had told me. Of the two, I tended to believe Lisa. I said, “What kind of car was she driving when she took you to the airport?”

  Lisa frowned. “Not the Volvo. Another foreign model, more expensive. It was the one Rob was driving when they took me home from the club that last night.”

  Probably the Jaguar I’d seen parked in their driveway earlier today. I asked, “Did you ever see a gun in Jay’s possession?”

  “He kept one behind the bar. Marc used to complain about it, because he doesn’t like guns. But Jay said it had to be there for protection.”

  “Do you know anything about guns?”

  “Yeah. My old man was a cop.”

  “What kind was the one at the club?”

  “A handgun, thirty-eight.”

  Same as the bullets found in the remains and in the Volvo.

  I stared at the blank TV screen for a minute, thinking of the dental records that had been used to identify those remains as Lisa’s. Thinking of how Marc Emmons, who presumably had known where Tracy had been bound that night, had suddenly become one of the “stars” at Café Comedie in the aftermath of her disappearance. And wondering about Jay Larkey and Kathy Soriano, off-and-on lovers because, according to him, “it makes the lady feel better.”

  Or did it make the gentleman feel more secure?

  Lisa said, “What if he finds out I told you?”