There's Nothing to Be Afraid Of

by Marcia Muller

  “Why not?”

  “Go on the radio? Live?” My voice came out a high-pitched squeak, and both of them laughed.

  “Seriously,” I said, “I couldn’t do it.”

  “Sure you could, babe,” Don said.

  “I’d be struck dumb.”

  “You? Never.”

  “Or die of sheer terror.”

  “This,” Don said to Carolyn, “is a woman who has been known to pack a thirty-eight.”

  “That’s different,” I said.

  “How?”

  “Well, that’s part of my job.”

  Carolyn said, “Then think of this radio show as part of your job, too.”

  I thought. My voice would quaver and crack; even if I wrote down what I wanted to say, I’d get it garbled; and afterwards I’d feel like running away to hide. But I guessed I could do it—for Duc, if for no reason.

  Then I thought of Greg Marcus. Was there any way he could accuse me of obstructing his investigation if I went on the air? No. How could he? He was the one who had told me the Vangs should wait until tomorrow before they even talked to the police. In Greg’s eyes, Duc’s disappearance had nothing to do with the cases he was working on.

  “I’ll do it.” I said.

  Don squeezed my hand.

  “But can we do it?” I added. “Will the station allow it?”

  His lips curved up slowly beneath his shaggy black mustache. “Of course.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Carolyn asked. “It’s at the last minute—”

  “Well, of course our program director, Tony Wilbur, will have the final say on that.”

  “Do you think he’ll agree?”

  “I know he will.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Because,” he said, drawing himself up proudly, “you are looking at the man who rescued a sodden and sloppy-drunk Tony Wilbur from jail the other night.”

  Of course—the Blue Lagoon fiasco. I said, “My mother always told me that a good deed never goes unrewarded. I’m finally beginning to believe her.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  KSUN’s studios were in a large white building that took up a square block on Army Street in the industrial Bayshore District. The building—rectangular, stark, and windowless—had no architectural merit whatsoever and would have blended in with the surrounding warehouses had it not been for the transmitting equipment and neon call letters on its roof. At seven that evening, the letters winked red against the dark sky.

  I parked next to Don’s Jaguar and went through the plate-glass doors to the lobby. Its walls were covered with plaques, framed awards, and publicity shots of the disc jockeys. Melissa, the night receptionist, sat at the desk, wearily leafing through a copy of Variety. When she saw me, she motioned at the door behind her and said, “Don’s in Studio D. I’ll buzz you in.”

  I’d been there many times before, so I knew to follow the hall straight ahead, past a big bulletin board that had all but disappeared under multiple layers of notices, schedules, posters of KSUN-sponsored events, ads for used merchandise, requests for apartments to rent, offers of free kittens, self-help workshops, exercise classes, guitar lessons, photography instruction, and low-cost psychotherapy. One of Don’s publicity stills hung there, and someone had drawn fangs and devil’s horns on it.

  At the end of the hall was a lounge with a couple of studios opening into it. A red warning light shone above the door to the first one, and through its windows I could see one of Don’s fellow jocks putting a record onto a turntable while he spoke into the mike. Don and Carolyn sat on the broken-down couch in the lounge, going over a typed list of questions.

  I greeted them, took off my jacket, and sat down in an armchair that was even rattier than the one in my office. Then I looked around, wrinkling my nose in distaste. I am a reasonably tidy person, and from the first time I’d seen this lounge, I had wanted to attack it with a broom and mop. The shabby furniture and scuffed linoleum floor were always littered with rumpled sections of the daily newspapers; the low table in front of the couch held an assortment of empty pop cans, Styrofoam cups, overflowing ashtrays, discarded food containers, and scraps of paper. Right now there was a distinct odor of cigar, and a browning apple core crowned the heap in one ashtray.

  “Okay,” Don said to Carolyn, “that will do for your part of the show.” Turning to me, he asked, “You nervous?”

  “Me?” I held out my hands to show there were steady.

  Don squeezed one and grinned when he felt how icy it was. “Relax,” he said. “It’s going to be fine. When we go on the air, you’ll forget about all the people out there and just talk as if the three of us were sitting around chatting.”

  “Sure.”

  “Trust me.”

  He consulted the typed sheet, then said, “Carolyn and I have been talking about how we should structure the show. First I’ll do a brief intro, asking Carolyn a few general questions, then lead into your case. You’ll explain about it, make your plea for information about Duc, and while we’re waiting for call-ins, Carolyn will discuss the Center and their work.”

  I nodded, liking the idea of getting my part over first.

  Don stood up. “Let’s go into the studio now so you can familiarize yourselves with it.”

  He led us into an unoccupied studio with a U-shaped console containing turntables, cassette players, a panel with dozens of buttons and switches, and a multiple-line phone. Behind the board—as the console was called—were shelves with racks of tapes, and to one side was a wall panel covered with gauges. Don showed Carolyn around, pointing out the equipment and talking about its functions, as he had the first time I’d visited the studio.

  I stepped behind the board and sat in the operator’s chair, my eyes drawn to the oscilloscope—a screen that looked like a target with moving green lines. Don had explained that it showed what the station’s signal was doing—in a sense measured KSUN’s pulse beat. He had also said it could be highly entertaining to watch on those occasions when a d.j. happened to smoke some of the grass that the engineer offered him during his long stint at the board. This unnamed engineer was also the one who brought beer and wine and hash brownies, and I found it interesting how the jocks’ unprofessional lapses were always laid squarely at his door.

  Off the main part of the studio was a booth measuring about four feet by ten feet, with a large window that overlooked the board. Don took us in there now. “This is where you’ll be sitting during the show,” he said. “I’ll be out at the board, and we’ll be able to communicate through these headsets.” He indicated two pairs of heavy rubber earphones that lay on the table under the window, along with microphones with foam rubber tips and another multiple-line phone.

  I put my purse on one of the straight-backed chairs and looked at the table, which was covered in carpet to muffle sound.

  Don went on, “I’m afraid it’ll get a little hot and stuffy in here once we’re on the air.” He grinned sheepishly and gestured at a vent in the acoustical-tiled wall. “We have a ventilation system, but it’s so noisy we don’t dare use it while were broadcasting.”

  Carolyn said, “I guess Sharon and I are willing to suffer.” She looked around, then motioned at a panel of colored lights next to the clock on the wall above the window. “What do these indicate?”

  “They’re the lights for the phones. The blue ones are outside lines—call ins. Green ones are inside lines.”

  “And the red one?”

  “In-house hot line. If it lights up, it probably means you’ve just said ‘fuck’ over the air, and the big boss is calling to schedule your execution by firing squad.”

  Carolyn laughed. I was too nervous to manage more than a feeble grin.

  Don reached over and touched a small metal box that sat on the table. “This is the talk-back box. If you press the button, you can talk directly into my earphones through the mike. Use it if there’s something you need to say to me that you don’t want the listeners to he
ar.”

  “All right,” Carolyn said. “So after Sharon makes her request for information, those phone lights will start flashing?”

  “Hopefully. Sometimes it’s a long wait. Fortunately, I can ask you questions in the meantime, so I won’t have to ad-lib as much as normally. On one of my live shows a few months ago, no one called for what seemed like hours. I was yattering away, but none of the interviewees was responding, and I was running out of stuff to say. Everybody was getting nervous with all this potential dead air, and when one of the lines finally flashed, I pounced on it so fast that I scared the caller and he hung up.”

  Carolyn said, “Doesn’t somebody screen the calls before you answer?”

  “You mean, do we have phone clearers? No, and it’s unusual. At most stations, the jocks don’t pickup their own phones—they want to weed out the obvious crazies. But here at KSUN, we answer right off. I’m not so sure it’s a good policy; the other afternoon I got an obscene drunk and I didn’t bleep him fast enough. Still, for some unknown reason, management seems proud of not screening calls.” Don shrugged and looked at his watch, “Fifteen minutes to air time. You know what you’re going to say, babe?”

  “Just what we discussed after lunch.”

  “Good. If you get nervous and feel your voice cracking or shaking, just take a couple of deep breaths. Don’t be afraid of dead air; no one expects you to be perfect.” He put an arm around me and gave me a brief hug.

  I shook my head, amazed at his confidence. But then, I was pretty confident about tackling a tough witness or going into a risky situation in my own work. It was just professionalism, that was all.

  Don had us sit down at the table and put the earphones on. He went back to the board, donned his own headset, and we went through the steps of talking back and forth, using the mikes, answering the phone. An engineer with long hair tied in a ponytail arrived—was he the one, I wondered, who corrupted the jocks with mind-altering substances? Soon it was only a minute to air time.

  I glanced nervously at Carolyn, and she patted my arm, looking as miserable as I felt. My ears were beginning to sweat under the heavy rubber headset, and the booth was already stuffy and hot. When the light flashed indicating we were on the air, I controlled an urge to bolt form the studio.

  Don began his intro into the show—cool and casual, sounding much more low-key than he did on what he referred to as his “daily screech and scream.”

  “Welcome to Don’s Forum. For those of you who are hoping for something wild and wonderful, I’ve got to apologize. We did a serious one last week. Yeah, you remember the one on Golden Gate Park and the rising costs of keeping it green. Sure you do. No? Well, anyway, last week I promised you that tonight we’d wail. Really wail with the boys from the Big Money Bank, in town for the Christmas show at the Cow Palace. Yeah, those boys are something!”

  At that point he looked up and winked at me. Those boys sure were something—especially when taking an impromptu swim the Blue Lagoon pool. I smiled back, thinking how different he was on the radio, even on this low-key show. The Don I knew was a man who used his words with economy, he would never chatter this way off the microphone.

  “Really something,” he said again. “And to prove it, they’ve waived air time tonight. Not permanently, mind you. But for tonight. Because tonight we’ve got two ladies here who have a problem. And they want to talk to you about it. They think you may have the solution for them. I tell you, it’s possible you could save a life. So stay tuned, and after this, we’ll get into it.”

  He pressed the button on one of the cassette players and a commercial came on. Through my earphones, I heard him say, “See? Easy. When this is over, I’ll introduce you, Carolyn.”

  Carolyn nodded and glanced at me, her face tense. My ears were sweating so badly that I reached into my purse for a Kleenex.

  The commercial ended, and Don said, “Okay, here we go. With us tonight—and you folks out there better be with us too—is Carolyn Bui of the Refugee Assistance Center. Carolyn—let’s be informal, huh, it’s an informal crowd out there, but good guys, all of them, I can vouch for it—Carolyn, you want to tell us what the Center does?”

  Carolyn cast a panicky look at me and then began to speak into the mike, her voice as cool and controlled as Don’s. She explained briefly about the influx of Southeast Asian refugees, their needs for food, housing, and jobs, and the Center’s role in helping them.

  “But there are a lot of problems in our work, Don,” she said. “It’s hard to find places for these people. They don’t have much money, and they need decent homes where they can bring up their kids.”

  “So you located them in areas where rents are cheap?”

  “Yes.”

  “And one of those areas is the Tenderloin?”

  “Right. And you know, by and large it’s been great. The people of the neighborhood have been very supportive. I think a lot of them—particularly the older people, who have raised their own families and miss them—welcome the children. The children have given life to what used to be a dead place. They laugh, they play. . . . Well, you know what it’s like to hear happy children at play.”

  “I sure do,” Don said. “And I understand things were going well for your people in the Tenderloin until recently. But now there’s trouble. Where did it start?”

  “In the Globe hotel. It’s a nice apartment hotel, and even nicer since our people moved in and helped the other residents fix it up. We thought we were lucky, but then . . .” Carolyn’s voice cracked and she looked at me.

  “But then you were forced to hire a private detective,” Don said smoothly. “And right now, folks, we’ll leave Carolyn for a while and talk with that lady. Yes, that’s right, she’s a lady. Women can do anything these days, and Sharon McCone detects better than most. She’s a staff investigator with All Souls Legal Cooperative out in Bernal Heights, and she’s been in some tough spots in the past and knows her stuff. So let’s have Sharon tell you about her case.”

  Until Don has said the words “private detective,” I’d been caught up in Carolyn’s seemingly effortless narrative. Now I was cold from nose to toes, in spite of the heat in the booth. Remembering Don’s prior advice, I took a deep breath. Through the glass, Don was smiling at me. Carolyn’s small hand pressed my arm. I made myself speak.

  “Thanks, Don. I appreciate you saying I detect better than most, but right now I’m on a case that has me stumped. A couple of days ago Carolyn asked me to come to the Globe Hotel, and there I met a wonderful Vietnamese-American family, the Vangs. There are nine of them, and they live in a two-bedroom apartment. They own a restaurant—Lan’s Garden, on Taylor Street—and everyone who is old enough works there. They are truly impressive people, the kind of people who build this country. And it’s a further tribute to them that the other residents of the hotel nominated them to speak to me about the problem.”

  Don was smiling more broadly now. I must be doing okay.

  I went on, “At first the problem seemed simple. Someone was frightening the kids in the stairwell. Growling at them. Howling. Silly stuff. The same thing was going on in the furnace room. And from time to time somebody would pull the main electrical switch and cause a power outage. I looked around but couldn’t figure out who was doing it. But I assumed they would eventually give up if no one panicked.”

  Don said, “But then what happened, Sharon?” His face was glowing. I must be doing better than okay.

  “A young man living at the hotel was murdered. His name was Hoa Dinh and he was sixteen years old. Hoa had come a long way from Vietnam, and he’d suffered a lot. But he’d made a new life for himself in this country, and then he died alone in a cold basement.” I could hear emotion cracking in my voice, feel Carolyn’s fingers pressing tighter on my arm.

  I took another deep breath before I went on. “But that’s not the immediate problem. The police are working on Hoa’s murder, and they will solve it.” That was my sop to Greg, in case he found out about this bro
adcast. “The real problem right now concerns Hoa’s best friend, Duc Vang. Duc—that’s D-u-c—has been missing since yesterday afternoon. He’s never done that before, and his family is afraid something has happened to him—something connected with this bad business at the hotel. And that’s why we’re talking to you. . . .” I faltered, uncertain how to address the faceless people, then sensed on Don’s term. “To all you folks out there. We need your help in locating Duc Vang.”

  Don cut in. “Can you describe him, Sharon?” He grinned, gave me a thumps up sing.

  Dam, I was good!

  I was so good I almost go carried away and forgot to answer.

  “Duc,” I said, with a proper flash of humility, “is five-foot-six. He has black hair--a crewcut that is growing out. It looks bushy, stands up straight. He’s slender and dresses in the old style, in a smock and loose pants. His mother says when she last saw him, he was wearing a blue smock and matching trousers. Oh, and he has a mole on his left cheek and likes to wear dark glasses.”

  I looked helplessly at Don, my earlier elation gone. He smiled, waited a couple of beats, then said, “So that’s the problem, folks. The reason we’re making you deal with serious stuff—that’s spelled s-e-r-i-o-u-s—twice in a row. Sharon’s a detective. Bona fide, card-carrying tough. Believe me, folks, this lady is tough. But she can’t figure it—Duc’s disappearance. And she can’t help him alone. Maybe you can help her. Come on, it’s your turn to detect. Make like Sherlock Holmes. You never heard of him? What about Miss Marple? No? Maybe Sam Spade. Yeah!

  “Anyway, folks, you want to help us? Maybe one of you has seen Duc, knows something about his whereabouts. You’ve got the description. You know as much as we do. You’ve got the number of the KSUN Hot Line. So let’s get those calls coming in! Give us some info, ask us some questions, but help us! In case you don’t remember, in San Francisco, the number’s 752-7445. In the East Bay, call 845-5018. You folks down on the Peninsula . . .”

  I expelled a breath and looked at Carolyn. She nodded, her eyes shining. Don finished and put on another tape of a commercial. Through the earphones, he said, “You guys were terrific.”