by Janet Dawson
From the time I was nine years old, I wanted a horse of my own. It didn’t matter that I was a college professor’s daughter growing up in a Victorian house on Sherman Street in Alameda, or that our lifestyle was more suited to cats and dogs than large animals with hooves. I really wanted that horse. And I cried when my mother and father tried to explain to me that we couldn’t very well keep a pony in the backyard.
Instead of galloping over the countryside on my own steed, I had to content myself with patient and plodding saddle horses at the local riding stables. Invariably, these mounts were more interested in returning to the barn than they were in cantering around the East Bay hills.
Now, as I thought about that child I had been, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been on a horse. That passion had been replaced, at various times in my life, with other ardors.
When I was eighteen, my grandmother introduced me to the sport of kings at Golden Gate Fields. Watching horses run, and betting on them, was different from wanting one. Gambling was more grown up. I remembered feeling so sophisticated as I parted with my two bucks at the parimutuel window, just as I had when I discovered sex.
Grandma and I stopped going to the track when her health began to fail. With her death, that chapter closed.
Molly Torrance had been around horses all her life. Nothing but, from the sound of it. But I’d had the stability of living in the same place most of my life. The life of the gypsy trainer, moving from track to track, state to state, might have sounded romantic to me when I was younger, but it didn’t now. I was settled in, not quite ready to declare myself middle-aged, but certainly not a youngster anymore.
Settled in for sure. I’d just bought my first house, and celebrated my thirty-fifth birthday. My birthday’s October 31 — Halloween. I’ve always thought it was great that everyone enjoys my special day by dressing up and going Trick-or-Treating. Since my house wasn’t quite put together yet, I’d dressed up and gone to a fancy restaurant with some friends and family.
My new home is on Chabot Road in Oakland’s Rockridge section, not far from the Berkeley border. I share the place with two cats, and it feels roomy compared to the one-bedroom apartment I’d lived in for over five years. I also have a tenant in the studio apartment above the garage.
I moved into the house a month ago. Most of the boxes are unpacked, and most of the furniture is arranged the way I want it. But I haven’t hung any pictures on the walls yet. I am waiting for the pictures to speak to me and tell me which walls they want to occupy. They remain silent, propped up two or three deep against the bare cream-colored walls, resting at an angle on the polished hardwood floors. This provides lurking places for the cats, who are still adapting to the new place.
The bare walls don’t bother me a bit. But they drive my tenant crazy.
“You haven’t hung those pictures yet?” Darcy Stefano asked me, half an hour after I’d arrived at home. “I’m just itching to get in here with a hammer and some picture hangers.”
When I’d opened the front door in response to her knock, she breezed into my living room, a canvas tote bag slung over one arm. It was full of DVDs. Over the past four weeks, we’d fallen into the habit of dinner and a movie, sometimes on the weekend, sometimes during the week.
“I’ve only lived here a month. Give it time. The pictures will speak.”
She snorted at me derisively, set the tote bag down with a thump, and knelt to examine a silk-screen print I’d bought several years ago in Mendocino, up on the North Coast. It was a view of Mendocino Bay from the village itself, with its Victorian architecture and water towers. The artist’s name was Anne Kendall Foote, and I’d bought it from her one summer a long time ago, before she died.
“I think this would look good on that wall over there,” Darcy said, pointing in the direction of the sofa.
“Maybe. Maybe not. I might hang the movie poster there.”
I was in the kitchen now, rattling pots and cutlery as I prepared dinner. It was going to be fairly simple, a green salad and pasta with pesto sauce, from Ratto’s, the hundred-year-old grocery in downtown Oakland. I’d baked an apple pie the day before, and there was some vanilla ice cream in the freezer.
“The movie poster,” Darcy said, half to herself. I glanced her way as she located the poster, startling Abigail, who’d been hiding behind it. Abigail was a plump, gray-brown tabby, well into cat middle age. I didn’t see any sign of Black Bart, the feral I’d adopted a year earlier. Whenever anyone came to the door, he hid, usually in the linen closet, burrowed down in between the towels. He was mostly black, as his name implied, with a white mask. The mask was the reason I’d named him after California’s most enigmatic highwayman, who’d worn a mask when he robbed all those Wells Fargo stagecoaches back in the nineteenth century.
Darcy had pulled the poster out and was looking at it critically. “Nah, I’d put Yul Brynner in the bedroom. For obvious reasons. I mean, talk about sweet dreams.”
“Racy dreams, anyway,” I said.
The poster in question was actually what the collectors call an insert, about half the width of a normal poster. It was from The Journey, a 1959 movie that’s one of my favorites, starring Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr. Yul plays a Russian major who is standing in the way of a group of people trying to get out of Hungary during the 1956 revolt. He has designs on Deborah, and I don’t mean geometric. The poster shows Brynner in uniform, with his hand around Kerr’s wrist. She’s got her hand on his chest and looks as though she can’t decide whether to push him away or grab him for a prolonged lip lock. I always thought the chemistry between them, in the movie anyway, was pretty sexy stuff. Darcy was right. I might hang the insert in the bedroom, which was below us, on the house’s lower level.
“I’d like to find another Brynner insert,” I said. “Maybe one from The Buccaneer.”
“You can look on the Internet.”
“Where do you think I found that one?”
She set the frame back against the wall. “I should look for a Tyrone Power poster for my place.”
Darcy and I had been having our own personal Tyrone Power film festival. She’d recently discovered the dark-haired 1940s screen idol while watching Power and Betty Grable in A Yank in the RAF on Turner Classic Movies, and decided he was quite a tasty specimen of male pulchritude. I readily agreed, having made the same discovery some years earlier. Darcy and I had then worked our way through the movies in my collection. She went on to ransack various rental outlets as well as purchase a few DVDs of her own. It wouldn’t be long before we’d viewed most of Power’s oeuvre, at least those movies available on DVD or on TV.
Darcy’s only eighteen, or perhaps I should say, eighteen going on forty. She’s got an entry-level job for an online magazine, working out of an office building in Oakland’s waterfront Produce District. If I know Darcy, it won’t be long until she’s moving up and taking over.
My being able to buy a house in the Bay Area’s crazy real estate market stems from the rather large fee I received last spring from Darcy’s parents, who live in Alameda, with Darcy’s thirteen-year-old brother Darren. They hired me to retrieve their daughter, who had liberated her mother’s credit card and flown off to Paris on what turned out to be a serious errand. During the summer, I’d helped bail Darcy out of an even more serious situation, one with a murder attached to it. And in September she’d given me a crucial piece of evidence in the case I’d been working on when I met David Vanitzky.
So our paths had become entwined, whether I liked it or not. When I’d inadvertently mentioned that this house I was buying had a studio apartment, I suddenly found myself with a tenant. So far it was working out fine. It was nice to have company now and then, and Darcy seemed to know when to keep her distance. She’d also volunteered for cat-watching and plant-watering duty when I traveled. The cases I’d been working on lately hadn’t sent me out of town, but I never knew when an investigation was going to send me off to the Oakland airport with my gray travel bag in
hand.
“What have we got on the bill tonight?” I asked. The water for the pasta was boiling and I’d heated the sauce in the microwave.
Darcy sat down on the floor, cross-legged, digging into the canvas bag she’d brought. “Depends on what you’re in the mood for. Music, romance, adventure on the high seas. Here’s one I bet you haven’t seen. It’s called Abandon Ship! And it sounds really good.” She held up a DVD and read the description of the movie from the back of the box. It involved an ocean liner hitting an old mine and lots of people in a lifeboat.
“I think I have seen it. Years ago. Good movie, as I recall, but fairly grim. I’m in the mood for something more lighthearted.”
I stepped through the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, carrying dishes and silverware. My dining room is a niche in the corner of the living room, next to the kitchen. My round oak table was here, next to the French doors that opened out onto the balcony and my backyard.
“Johnny Apollo.” Darcy delved into the bag once again. “Gangsters and Dorothy Lamour. Captain from Castile. Ty conquers Mexico with Cesar Romero and Lee J. Cobb. Or we’ve got Alexander’s Ragtime Band. Not only Ty, but Don Ameche, Alice Faye, and Ethel Merman. Lots of Irving Berlin songs.”
“That’s it. I’ll take Irving Berlin any time. Unless the other choice is George and Ira Gershwin. Or Rodgers and Hammerstein.” I headed back to the kitchen, where the water was boiling. I dumped a box of fusilli into it.
“What about Stephen Sondheim?” Darcy countered. “Andrew Lloyd Webber?”
“Sorry, I grew up on Rodgers and Hammerstein. I prefer The King and I and South Pacific.” I stared at the pot of pasta which, despite my watching it, was boiling rapidly. “I wish we could find a copy of Nightmare Alley. It’s not exactly light-hearted, though.” I got the salad out of the refrigerator and carried it into the living room. “What are we going to do when we run out of Tyrone Power movies?”
“Switch to Robert Mitchum?” Darcy suggested. “Or William Holden?”
“Either one would be okay by me. They’re both easy on the eyes. What about Bogart? I’ve got a bunch of Bogart movies.”
Darcy agreed that Humphrey was definitely a possibility. The pasta was ready. I tossed it with the pesto and we sat down to dinner.
“Working on anything interesting?” she asked as she doused her salad with bottled dressing.
“Maybe.” I suspected Darcy harbored a secret passion to be my associate, even though I’d told her that being a private investigator was not so much Dashiell Hammett and Philip Marlowe as it was paperwork, databases, and the occasional surveillance assignment. It’s sometimes hard to convince people of that. I wondered now if the romance of the private detective was like the romance of horse racing. I guess I was about to find out.
I told Darcy I’d spent my afternoon at Edgewater Downs racetrack, watching the ponies run.
“Sounds boring,” she said, raising a forkful of fusilli toward her mouth.
“Oh, no. Haven’t you ever been to a horse race? Or watched one on television?”
“No. Why would I do that?”
“Because it’s...” I searched for words to convey what I’d felt that afternoon while watching Chameleon win the race. “It’s exciting. It’s a contest, with lots of variables. The horses, the jockeys, the condition of the track. Anything can happen, like this afternoon. The horse I bet on wasn’t the favorite, but he came in first. That was a thrill.”
Darcy wrinkled her nose. “I thought it was just a bunch of seedy old guys betting the rent money on horses. Or those gamblers singing ‘Fugue for Tinhorns’ in Guys and Dolls.”
I was shaking my head now. “I can see I’m going to have to introduce you to the sport of kings, the way my Grandma Jerusha introduced me.”
Even as I said the words I wasn’t sure Darcy would ever see horse racing the way I did. I remembered the people I’d seen at the track this afternoon, most of them middle-aged or older. There hadn’t been anyone Darcy’s age there. Maybe the sport of kings wasn’t what it used to be.
“Okay, I’ll try anything once,” Darcy said.
“As well we know.”
She sniffed derisively and speared a lettuce leaf. “I’ll visit your racetrack. But I have to tell you, it sounds boring to me.”
“Didn’t you ever want a horse?” I asked, desperate for some connection to this younger generation. “When you were a kid, I mean.”
Now she looked at me as though I’d been smoking some mind-altering substance. “What in the world would I want with a horse?”
I raised my eyes to the ceiling. “I give up.”
“Just finish your dinner,” she ordered, “so we can get on to Tyrone.”
Chapter Seven
I USUALLY RESERVE SUNDAYS FOR MYSELF. First a leisurely breakfast, then a couple of pleasant hours on the sofa with Abigail in my lap, me perusing the newspaper and drinking coffee, Abigail curled into a fat ball, sleeping with her paws over her nose. She grumbles whenever I move her to get another cup of coffee. But as soon as I sit down again, back she comes, kneading my legs before circling into a ball.
When I was done with the paper, I put it in the recycling bin and went outside to my car. Soon I was on the Nimitz Freeway heading southeast along the shore of San Francisco Bay. I took the exit for Alvarado-Niles Road, which cut through Union City before crossing an overpass that spanned some railroad tracks. Here the road became Niles Boulevard, and I was within the Fremont city limits. Or, more properly, the Niles district.
Niles had once been one of the small towns that dotted the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay, but in 1956 it had joined with four other towns — Mission San José, Irvington, Warm Springs, and Centerville — to incorporate as a city named Fremont. Now it was one of the most populous cities in the Bay Area, sprawling across southern Alameda County from the county line to the city limits I’d just entered, from the bay to the hills.
Niles was cut off from the rest of Fremont by Alameda Creek. I’d visited the old business district near the mouth of Niles Canyon many times before. It was lined with antique stores that tempted me to poke around on the shelves and in the bins. Once a year Niles hosts a silent film festival, as well as an antique fair. The fair radiates out from its little depot near the railroad tracks that parallel Niles Boulevard. Serious antique hunters got there by four A.M., but I’d never been serious enough about buying antiques to get up at that hour to shop. Now I turned right onto G Street and drove a couple of blocks, slowing down as I neared Third Street, looking for Molly Torrance’s address.
It was an Essanay house, I noted with pleased surprise as I parked my Toyota on the street and got out. I’d always wanted to see the inside of an Essanay house. Since my latest client lived in one, it looked as though I would finally get the chance.
Anyone who knows anything about old movies — and I do — knows that long ago, back in the teens, silent pictures were made in Niles. In 1912, Gilbert M. Anderson, better known as movie cowboy Broncho Billy Anderson, joined forces with George K. Spoor of Chicago. They used the initials of their last names, calling their company Essanay.
Essanay had an office in Chicago, but Niles was where they built what was then a state-of-the-art movie studio, on the block bordered by Niles Boulevard, Second Street, and F and G streets. It was a half-million-dollar facility complete with offices, a projection room, shops, dressing rooms, and klieg lights. Later they added a covered stage, and there were separate stables for horses, a stagecoach, and buggies used for the Westerns that made Anderson a star.
From 1912 to 1916, Essanay made hundreds of movies in their studio near the corner of what was now Niles Boulevard and G Street, frequently using the little town’s streets and Niles Canyon for exteriors. One of those films was Charlie Chaplin’s The Tramp. During those four years, Chaplin and Broncho Billy were joined by other silent stars, such as Marie Dressier, Wallace Beery, Zasu Pitts, Slim Summerville, Edna Purviance, Ben Turpin, and Chester Conklin.
Sometimes the stars stayed at local hostelries, such as the Belvoir Hotel, which still stood on a hillside just the other side of the Sullivan Underpass. However, the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company built ten bungalows for its stars and its executives, small wood-framed houses that were easily recognizable for their architectural style. All of them still stood, six in a row along Second Street. Four others had been moved to other locations in Niles.
I was looking at an Essanay bungalow now. It was painted pale blue with dark blue trim. Under the front windows, hugging the foundation, were several camellia bushes with waxy dark green leaves and fat buds showing a hint of pink. A planter hanging from a hook on the front porch held a scarlet geranium. A black mailbox on a post stood near the foot of the porch, and a basket on the steps themselves held orange and yellow gourds as well as several ears of colorful Indian corn.
The lot on which the house sat appeared to be much deeper than it was wide, and over the roof I could see the tops of several large trees in the backyard. Weathered plank fences, about five feet high, separated the lot from those on either side. On my left a gravel driveway ran along one of the fences, leading back to a detached garage. To my right, along the other fence, I saw a blackened patch of grass marring what was an otherwise well-kept lawn. The patch was roughly oblong, starting about ten or twelve feet from the street. At the far end of the patch was a segment of fence that was charred and broken.
Molly had been correct when she’d said that it was lucky someone had reported the fire. The section of fence that had burned was only about eight feet from the side of the house itself. It wouldn’t have taken much for the flames to leap from the planks to the wood frame structure.
It looked to me, however, that the structure that had been in greater danger of fire was the house next door, the one owned by Ron Douglas. In contrast to the neatly mowed Torrance lawn, the grass in Douglas’s yard was high, unkempt, and brown, despite the fact that it was November and we’d had our first rain of the season. Several branches had been sawed off a scraggly looking pine tree on his side of the fence. The branches lay there, next to a hand saw. The tree itself looked as though it needed to be taken out entirely. Some sort of disease or insect had made serious inroads.