The McCone Files

by Marcia Muller

  The melody of “My Little Girl” was still running through my head as I drove back down the freeway to Petaluma, the southernmost community in the county. A picturesque river town with a core of nineteenth-century business building, Victorian homes, and a park with a bandstand, it is surrounded by little hills—which is what the Indian word Petaluma means. The town used to be called the Egg Basket of the World, because of the proliferation of hatcheries such as the one where Eddie Weiss worked, but since the decline of the egg- and chicken-ranching business, it has become a trendy retreat for those seeking to avoid the high housing costs of San Francisco and Marin. I had friends there—people who had moved up from the city for just that reason—so I knew the lay of the land fairly well.

  Bassett Street was on the older west side of town, far from the bland, treeless tracts that have sprung up to the east. The address I was seeking turned out to be a small white frame bungalow with a row of lilac bushes planted along the property line on either side. Their branches hung heavy with as yet unopened blossoms; in a few weeks the air would be sweet with their perfume.

  When I went up on the front porch and rang the bell, I was greeted by a very pregnant young woman. Her name, she said, was Bonita Clark; she and her husband Russ had bought the house two years before from some people named Berry. The Berrys’ had lived there for at least ten years and had never mentioned anyone named Weiss.

  I hadn’t really expected to find Stephanie Weiss still in residence, but I’d hoped the present owner could tell me where she had moved. I said, “Do you know anyone on the street who might have lived here in the early seventies?”

  “Well, there’s old Mrs. Caubet. The pink house on the corner with all the rosebushes. She’s lived here forever.”

  I thanked her and went down the sidewalk to the house she’d indicated. Its front yard was a thicket of rosebushes whose colors ranged from yellows to reds to a particularly beautiful silvery purple. The rain had stopped before I’d reached town, but not all that long ago; the roses’ velvety petals were beaded with droplets.

  Mrs. Caubet turned out to be a tall, slender woman with sleek gray hair, vigorous-looking in a blue sweatsuit and athletic shoes. I felt a flicker of amusement when I first saw her, thinking of how Bonita Clark had called her “old,” and said she’d lived there “forever.” Interesting, I thought, how one’s perspective shifts…

  Yes, Mrs. Caubet said after she’d examined my credentials, she remembered the Weisses well. They’d moved to Bassett Street in 1970. “Ruth was already ill with the cancer that killed her,” she added. “Steff was only seventeen, but so grown-up, the way she took care of her mother.”

  “Did either of them ever mention a man named Victor Rios?”

  The woman’s expression became guarded. “You say you’re working for Ruth’s father?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked thoughtful, then motioned at a pair of white wicker chairs on the wraparound porch. “Let’s sit down.”

  We sat. Mrs. Caubet continued to look thoughtful, pleating the ribbing on the cuff of her sleeve between her fingers. I waited.

  After a time she said, “I wondered if Ruth’s father would ever regret disowning her.”

  “He’s in poor health. It’s made him realize he doesn’t have much longer to make amends.”

  “A pity that it took until now. He’s missed a great deal because of his stubbornness. I know; I’m a grandparent myself. And I’d like to put him in touch with Steff, but I don’t know what happened to her. She left Petaluma six months after Ruth died.”

  “Did she say where she planned to go?”

  “Just something about getting in touch with some relatives. By that I assumed she meant her father’s family in the city. She promised to write, but she never did, not even a Christmas card.”

  “Will you tell me what you remember about Ruth and Stefanie? It may give me some sort of lead, and besides, I’m sure my client will want to know about their lives after his falling-out with Ruth.”

  She shrugged. “It can’t hurt. And to answer your earlier question, I have heard of Victor Rios. He was Ruth’s second husband; although the marriage was a fairly long one, it was not a particularly good one. When she was diagnosed as having cancer, Rios couldn’t deal with her illness, and he left her. Ruth divorced him, took back her first husband’s name. It was either that, she once told me, or Greenglass, and she was even more bitter toward her father than toward Rios.”

  “After Victor Rios left, what did Ruth and Stephanie live on? I assume Ruth couldn’t work.”

  “She had some savings—and, I suppose, alimony.”

  “It couldn’t have been very much. Jody Greenglass told me Rios was an illiterate laborer.”

  Mrs. Caubet frowned. “That’s nonsense! He must have manufactured the idea, out of prejudice and anger at Ruth for leaving her first husband. He considered Eddie Weiss a son you know. It’s true that when Ruth met Rios, he didn’t have a good command of the English language as he might, but he did have a good job at Sunset Line and Twine. They weren’t rich, but I gather they never lacked for the essentials.”

  It made me wonder what else Greenglass had manufactured. “Did Ruth ever admit to living with Rios before their marriage?”

  “No, but it wouldn’t have surprised me. She always struck me as a nonconformist. And that, of course, would explain her father’s attitude.”

  “One other thing puzzles me,” I said. “I checked with the high school, and they have no record of Stephanie attending.”

  “That’s because she went to parochial school. Rios was Catholic, and that’s what he wanted. Ruth didn’t care either way. As it was, Steff dropped out in her junior year to care for her mother. I offered to arrange home care so she might finish her education—I was once a social worker and know how to go about it—but Steff said no. The only thing she really missed about school, she claimed, was choir and music class. She had a beautiful singing voice.”

  So she’d inherited her grandfather’s talent, I thought. A talent I was coming to regard as considerable, since I still couldn’t shake the lingering melody of “My Little Girl.”

  “How did Stephanie feel about her grandfather? And Victor Rios?” I asked.

  “I think she was fond of Rios, in spite of what he’d done to her mother. Her feelings toward her grandfather I’m less sure of. I do remember that toward the end Steff had become very like her mother; observing that alarmed me somewhat.”

  “Why?”

  “Ruth was a very bitter woman, totally turned in on herself. She had no real friends, and she seemed to want to draw Steff into a little circle from which the two of them could fend off the world together. By the time Steff left Petaluma she’d closed off, too. Withdrawn from what few friends she’d been permitted. I’d say such bitterness in so young a woman is cause for alarm, wouldn’t you?”

  “I certainly would. And I suspect that if I do find her, it’s going to be very hard to persuade her to reconcile with her grandfather.”

  Mrs. Caubet was silent for a moment, the said, “She might surprise you.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “It’s just a feeling I have. There was a song Mr. Greenglass wrote in celebration of Steff’s birth. Do you know about it?”

  I nodded.

  “They had a record of it. Ruth once told me that it was the only thing he’d ever given them, and couldn’t bear to take that away from Steff. Anyway, she used to play it occasionally. Sometimes I’d go over there, and Steff would be humming the melody while she worked around the house.”

  That didn’t mean much, I thought. After all, I’d been mentally humming it since that morning.

  When I arrived back in the city I first checked at All Souls to see if there had been a response to my inquiry from my friend at the DMV. There hadn’t. Then I headed for Glen Park to break the news about his daughter’s death to Jody Greenglass, as well as to get some additional information.

  This time there were a fe
w customers in the store: a young couple poking around in Housewares; an older woman selecting some knitting yarn. Greenglass sat at his customary position behind the counter. When I gave him the copy of Ruth’s death certificate, he read it slowly, then folded it carefully and placed it in his shirt pocket. His lips trembled inside their nest of fluffy white beard, but otherwise he betrayed no emotion. He said, “I take it you didn’t find Stephanie Ann at the address.”

  “She left Petaluma about six months after Ruth died. A neighbor thought she might have planned to go to relatives. Would that be the Weisses, do you suppose?”

  He shook his head. “Norma and Al died within months of each other in the mid-sixties. They had a daughter, name of Sandra, but she married and moved away before Eddie and Ruth died. To Los Angeles, I think. I’ve no idea what her husband’s name might be.”

  “What about Eddie Weiss—what happened to him?”

  “I didn’t tell you?”

  “No.”

  “He died a few months after Ruth divorced him. Auto accident. He’d been drinking. Damned near killed his parents, following so close on the divorce. That was when Norma and Al stopped talking to me; I guess they blamed Ruth. Things got so uncomfortable there on the old street that I decided to come to live here at the store.”

  The customer who had been looking at yarn came up, her arms piled high with heather-blue skeins. I stepped aside so Greenglass could ring up the sale, glanced over my shoulder at the jukebox, then went up to it and played “My Little Girl” again. As the mellow notes poured from the machine, I realized that what had been running through my head all day was not quite the same. Close, very close, but there were subtle differences.

  And come to think of it, why should the song have made such an impression, when I’d only heard it once? It was catchy, but there was no reason for it to haunt me as it did.

  Unless I’d heard something like it. Heard it more than one. And recently…

  I went around the counter and asked Greenglass if I could use his phone. Dialed the familiar number of radio KSUN, the Light of the Bay. My former lover, Don Del Boccio, had just come into the studio for his six-to-midnight stint as disc jockey, heartthrob, and hero to half a million teenagers who have to be either hearing-impaired or brain-damaged, and probably both. Don said he’d be glad to provide expert assistance, but not until he got off work. Why didn’t I meet him at his loft around twelve-thirty?

  I said I would and hung up, thanking the Lord that I somehow managed to remain on mostly good terms with the men from whom I’ve parted.

  Don said, “Hum it again.”

  “You know I’m tone-deaf.”

  “You have no vocal capabilities. You can distinguish tone, though. And I can interpret your warbling. Hum it.”

  We were seated in his big loft in the industrial district off Third Street, surrounded by his baby grand piano, drums, sound equipment, books, and—recent acquisition—a huge aquarium of tropical fish. I’d taken a nap after going home from Greenglass’ and felt reasonably fresh. Don—a big, easygoing man who enjoys his minor celebrity status and also keeps up his serious musical interest—was reasonably wired. We were drinking red wine and picking at a plate of antipasto he’d casually thrown together.

  “Hum it,” he said again.

  I hummed, badly, my face growing hot as I listened to myself.

  He imitated me—on key. “It’s definitely not rock, not with that temp. Soft rock? Possibly. There’s something about it…that sextolet—”

  “That what?”

  “An irregular rhythmic grouping. One of the things that makes it stick in your mind. Folk? Maybe country. You say you think you’ve been hearing it recently?”

  “That’s the only explanation I can come up with for it sticking in my mind the way it has.”

  “Hmm. There’s been some new stuff coming along recently, out of L.A. rather than Nashville, that might…You listen to a county station?”

  “KNEW, when I’m driving sometimes.”

  “Disloyal thing.”

  “I never listened to KSUN much, even when we…”

  Our eyes met and held. We were both remembering, but I doubted if the mental images were the same. Don and I are too different; that was what ultimately broke us up.

  After a moment he grinned and said, “Well, no one over the mental age of twelve does. Listen, what I guess is that you’ve been hearing a song that’s a variation on the melody of the original one: which is odd, because it’s an uncommon one to begin with.”

  “Unless the person who wrote the new song knew the old one.”

  “Which you tell me isn’t likely, since it wasn’t very popular. What is it you’re investigating—a plagiarism case?”

  I shook my head. If Jody Greenglass’ last song had been plagiarized, I doubted it was intentional—at least not on the conscious level. I said, “Is it possible to track down the song, do you suppose?”

  “Sure. Care to run over to the studio? I can do a scan on our library, see what we’ve got.”

  “But KSUN doesn’t play anything except hard rock.”

  “No, but we get all sorts of promos, new releases. Let’s give it a try.”

  “There you are,” Don said. “’It Never Stops Hurting.’ Steff Rivers. Atlas Records. Released last November.”

  I remembered it now, half heard as I’d driven the city streets with my old MG’s radio tuned low. Understandable that for her professional name she’d Anglicized that of the only father figure she’d ever known.

  “Play it again,” I said.

  Don pressed the button on the console and the song flooded the sound booth, the woman’s voice soaring and clean. The lyrics were about grieving for a lost lover, but I thought I knew other experiences that had gone into creating the naked emotion behind them; the scarcely known father who had died after the mother left him; the grandfather who had rejected both mother and child; the stepfather who had been unable to cope with fatal illness and had run away.

  When the song ended and silence filled the little booth, I said to Don, “How would I go about locating her?”

  He grinned, “One of the Atlas reps just happens to be a good friend of mine. I’ll give her a call in the morning, see what I can do.”

  The rain started again early the next morning. It made the coastal road that wound north on the high cliffs above the Pacific highway dangerously slick. By the time I arrived at the village of Gualala, just over the Mendocino County line, it was close to three and the cloud cover was beginning to break up.

  The town, I found, was just a strip of homes and businesses between the densely forested hills and the sea. A few small shopping centers, some unpretentious eateries, the ubiquitous realty offices, a new motel, and a hotel built during the logging boom of the late 1800s—that was about it. It would be an ideal place, I thought, for retirees or starving artists, as well as a young woman seeking frequent escape from the pressures of a career in the entertainment industry.

  Don’s record-company friend had checked with someone she knew in Steff Rivers’ producer’s office to find out her present whereabouts, had sworn me to secrecy about where I’d received the information and given me the address. I’d pinpointed the turnoff from the main highway on a county map. It was a small lane that curved off toward the sea about a half mile north of town; the house at its end was actually a pair of A-frames, weathered gray shingle, connected by a glassed-in walkway. Hydrangeas and geraniums bloomed in tubs on either side of the front door; a stained glass oval depicting a sea gull in flight hung in the window. I left the MG next to a gold Toyota sports car parked in the drive.

  There was no answer to my knock. After a minute I skirted the house and went abound back. The lawn there was weedy and uneven; it sloped down toward a low grape stake fence that guarded the edge of the ice-plant-covered bluff. On a bench in front of it sat a small figure wearing a red rain slicker, the hood turned up against the fine mist. The person was motionless, staring out at the flat, g
ray ocean.

  When I started across the lawn, the figure turned. I recognized Steff Rivers from the publicity photo Don had dug out of KSUN’s files the night before. Her hair was black and cut very short, molded to her head like a bathing cap; her eyes were large, long-lashed, and darkly luminous. In her strong features I saw traces of Jody Greenglass’.

  She called out, “Be careful there. Some damn rodent has dug the yard up.”

  I walked cautiously the rest of the way to the bench.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with it,” she said, gesturing at a hot tub on a deck opening off the glassed-in walkway of the house. “All I can figure is something’s plugging the drain.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Aren’t you the plumber?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. I knew she was a woman, and I thought…Who are you then?”

  I took out my identification and showed it to her. Told her why I was there.

  Steff Rivers seemed to shrink inside her loose slicker. She drew her knees up and hugged them with her arms.

  “He needs to see you,” I concluded. “He wants to make amends.”

  She shook her hear. “It’s too late for that.”

  “Maybe. But he is sincere.”

  “Too bad.” She was silent for a moment, turning her gaze back toward the sea. “How did you find me? Atlas and my agent know better than to give out this address.”

  “Once I knew Stephanie Weiss was Steff Rivers, it was easy.”

  “And how did you find that out?”

  “The first clue I had was ‘It Never Stops Hurting.’ You adapted the melody of ‘My Little Girl’ for it.”

  “I what?” she turned her head toward me, features froze in surprise. Then she was very still, seeming to listen to the song inside her head. “I guess I did. My God…I did.”