Wolf in the Shadows

by Marcia Muller

  I took the picture of Hy from my bag and passed it across the table. “This man was a guest here on Sunday. Do you remember him?”

  Griffith scrutinized the photo with trained eyes—former cop’s eyes, I was willing to bet. “Yeah, I remember him. Paid particular attention to him, as a matter of fact.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s got a way about him. Quiet, but he could be trouble.”

  “Did you have any trouble with him?”

  Griffith shook his head. “Shows you never can tell. Why’re you looking for him?”

  “Routine skip trace. How many times did you see him?”

  “Twice. When he checked in and late Sunday afternoon, maybe quarter to five, when he was driving out of the parking lot.”

  “You notice which way he went?”

  “Left, like he might be picking up the freeway west.”

  “And that’s the last you saw of him?”

  “Right.” Griffith looked at his watch; he’d be wanting to get back to work soon.

  I glanced around the coffee shop at the two waitresses who were clearing tables. “Tell me, are the waitresses on shift now the same ones who would have been working around four-thirty on Sunday?”

  “Probably.” He turned and called to the woman nearest us, “Hey, Emma, your shift’s four to midnight, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You want to come over here a minute? Lady’s got a question.”

  Emma set down the tray she was loading and moved toward the booth, wiping her hands on her apron. She was well over retirement age, very thin, and walked as if her joints ached. Griffith got up and gave her his place. “You set awhile. I got to get going.” To me he added, “You need anything else, the desk clerk’ll know where to find me.”

  Emma heaved a weary sigh as she sank onto the banquette. “What do you want to ask me, honey?”

  I handed her the by now well-thumbed photo of Hy. “Did you see this man in here on Sunday afternoon?”

  She squinted at it, then nodded. “He was one of my first customers. Kind of quiet. Good tipper.”

  “Did he say anything? Ask you anything?”

  “Well, as a matter of fact, he did. When I brought the check he asked how long it would take him to drive to Imperial Beach. That’s where I live, so I could tell him practically to the minute. Then he asked if I knew where the Holiday Market is down there. I told him right on the main street—Palm Avenue. I kind of wondered what he’d want with a place like that.”

  “What sort of place is it?”

  “Mexican hangout. Open twenty-four hours. There’re always at least a dozen Mexes there, loitering in the parking lot.” She glanced toward the kitchen door, anxious lines puckering her forehead. “Honey, I got to get back to clearing those tables. The boss’s looking.”

  “Thanks for your time, Emma.” I fished a bill from my wallet and passed it across the table to her.

  “Thank you.”

  I got up and moved toward the lobby door, fitting what Emma and Griffith had told me into my mental picture of Hy’s movements on Sunday. At four-thirty, more or less, he’d asked about the Holiday Market in Imperial Beach, one of the communities in the South Bay, between downtown San Diego and the border. At around quarter to five he’d driven out of the parking lot, possibly headed that way. But at nine he’d been back in his room here to make the call to Alicia Ferris telling her the drop was set for eleven. What had been the purpose of the trip to Imperial Beach? An intermediate contact with the kidnappers? Part of what Renshaw called the “usual nonsense”? Very possibly. But why send him all the way down there, to a place where he would be conspicuous? So the kidnappers could be sure who they were dealing with, or so someone could make an identification of him?

  As I crossed the lobby toward the cocktail lounge, I noticed that the man in western wear was the only person left there. He’d swiveled his chair slightly, giving himself a good view of the coffee-shop entrance. I looked directly at him as I passed; he seemed aware of me, but kept his eyes on his newspaper.

  That made me suspect he was part of a surveillance team. According to the motel map, the coffee shop had an entrance from the parking lot, as did the bar. If Renshaw’s people had done their homework—and I was sure they had—they’d have someone outside as well.

  Getting out of here was going to be more difficult than I’d anticipated. Still, I knew the territory….

  The interior of the bar had a steamy, tropical feel—probably because the air conditioning wasn’t functioning properly. A waterfall flowing over lava rock into a pool that contained two bloated koi further added to the humidity. The decorator had been heavy-handed with fishnets and seashells, stands of fake bamboo and plastic bird-of-paradise plants, capiz-shell tables, and rattan chairs. Thus inspired, he or she seemed to have gone berserk: a replica of an outrigger canoe outlined with winking blue and green lights, hung from the ceiling; more tikis supported the thatched roof of the bar; the ashtrays were shaped like giant garish pineapples. I half expected to see a conga line of bare-breasted hula dancers wend its way from the rest rooms. I slipped onto a stool and ordered a glass of white wine from a tropical-shirted bartender whose shoulders bore the burden of an enormous plastic-flower lei.

  He brought the wine and set it down with a sour look at a quartet of noisy tourists drinking fruit-garnished concoctions and talking about their visit to Sea World. I fished my I.D. and Hy’s picture from my bag and laid them on the bar next to a twenty.

  The bartender noted all three, cocked his head, and waited.

  “Sunday night,” I said, “around eight. This man was in here?”

  He nodded.

  “You serve him?”

  “One beer. He nursed it, maybe forty-five minutes.”

  “You talk with him?”

  “He’s not the kind who chats up the bartender.”

  “What else?”

  “He asked for change for the cigarette machine, bought some, and left.”

  But Hy didn’t smoke. So far as I knew, he never had. “You’re sure he bought cigarettes?”

  “Winstons.” He motioned to the bar’s left. The machine was the only thing in here that the decorator hadn’t managed to trick up.

  The tourists called for another round. The bartender excused himself, muttering under his breath. I sipped wine, glanced through the door to the lobby; the man in western wear hadn’t moved. Quickly I reviewed my options and decided how to handle this.

  When the bartender came back, I asked, “Is there anything else you can tell me?”

  “That’s it. He was a nice, quiet customer—and from me, that’s praise.” Another sour look at the tourists and he began fixing their drinks.

  It wasn’t much information for twenty dollars, I thought, but left the bill on the bar next to my half-full glass of wine. Then I moved toward the hallway leading to the rest rooms and stopped at the pay phone. After a brief call to Reliable Cab Company, I stepped through the parking-lot exit.

  The air was still sultry at half past midnight—unusual for San Diego in June. Soft halos from security lamps relieved the darkness. I saw no one on foot or in any of the cars. Moving casually, I turned toward the wing where my room was. Held down my pace and regulated it, listening for a counter rhythm. For a moment I heard nothing but the slap of my own shoes; then I heard others, like a soft echo of mine.

  I kept walking slowly, went as far as the door to my room, then hesitated, feigning indecision. Began walking again, toward the motel next door. The footsteps—at some indeterminate point behind me—stuttered. Then they came on regularly again, their sound deflected faintly off the surrounding buildings. I gave no sign I was aware of them, just moved in my ambling out-for-a-stroll pace toward the next motel’s main entrance. The footsteps stopped; my tail was allowing me some distance.

  Big mistake. Once inside the lobby, I put on speed. Slipped around a tall planter and ducked my head, moving even faster. The bar and ladies’ room entrances were
exactly where I remembered them.

  I pushed through the swinging door of the rest room, heart pounding now. On my way past the mirrors I caught a startled look from a woman who was combing her hair. Caught a glimpse of myself, too: grim, intense, focused.

  Out the other swinging door and into the pool area. Darkness there except for the bright aquamarine rectangle. No hesitation now—a jog to the right, up some steps, through the gate in the enclosure, and into the gardens.

  White crushed-shell paths winding through the shrubbery. Small lights bordering them, and a soft glow from some of the guest-room windows. I chose a path, plunged off it, ran along its side, out of range of the lights.

  No point in listening for a pursuer; I couldn’t have heard one. No point in looking back; it would only slow me.

  Gardenias there—sweet, decaying fragrance. Something else, a bitter-smelling plant. Around a hedge, and then the lights of Paoli’s Restaurant shining bright across the parking lot.

  The lot was at a lower level, bordered by a four-foot-high retaining wall. I crouched on top of it, jumped, feet hitting the concrete and pain shooting up my legs. Ignoring it, I ran for the shelter of the cars and dodged through them.

  At the last row of cars, I stopped, leaning against one. Glanced back at last.

  No one.

  I scanned the front of the restaurant. And saw Reliable Cab number 1102, waiting just where I’d asked for it to be. I hefted my bag and began running toward it.

  Sist’r Rabbit was on the way to her brier patch.

  Ten

  The house lay dark and silent, burdened by age, neglect, and—to a person who knew its recent history—disappointment. I pulled the key that had been mine since high school from the lock, shut the door behind me, and dropped my heavy purse on the floor.

  Heat was trapped in there, mustiness, too. Out of habit, I moved down the hall toward the kitchen. The floorboards creaked, the joists sighed. Other settling noises formed a chorus of complaint.

  When I switched on the kitchen light, the enormity of the changes overwhelmed me. No cheerful flowered dishes in the glass-fronted cupboards; no bright pottery bowls and red canisters on the counters. Those things had all gone to Ma’s new kitchen in the Rancho Bernardo home she shared with her new love, Melvin Hunt. The room smelled wrong—of cleanser rather than hearty cooking.

  I crossed to the sink, peered out the window at the dark rectangle of garage. I hadn’t expected anything, but it still seemed strange not to see lights, not to hear the whine of power tools, a baseball game on the radio, Pa’s reedy voice raised in one of his dirty ditties. But Pa had been traveling around the country in his new camper for three months now—traveling, I suspected, with a new woman friend. Funny none of us had dared ask about that; was Pa really such a private person that he’d have resented his grown sons and daughters inquiring into his new life?

  I turned my back to the window, leaning against the sink, shutting my eyes and listening. Traffic noises—had there been any at this hour—were muted here at the far end of the cul-de-sac, but even so, the house had never been so quiet. There was no laughter, no bickering, no shouts and taunts and sudden bursts of song. The voices of my parents, us five kids, our friends and relatives, even the most recent grandchildren, had been stilled. All that spoke to me were memories.

  What was I doing here?

  Well, for one thing, this house was the best refuge I knew from RKI’s surveillance. For many years Pa—now there was a true paranoid—had insisted on an unlisted phone number. Since the divorce, the property wasn’t even in his name on the tax rolls; in order to divide their community property with Ma, he’d been forced to sell, and he’d struck a bargain with the only family member who had any real money, my sister Charlene’s husband, country-music star Ricky Savage. A few years back when everybody else had given up on Ricky being anything but a backup musician in a second-rate band, Pa had loaned him the money to cut one final demo record. Ricky had hit it big with “Cobwebs in the Attic of My Mind,” and since then he’d looked for a suitable way to pay Pa back for his confidence in him. The divorce crisis was made to order: Ricky bought the house and signed an agreement saying Pa could live there as long as he wanted; the property was now listed in the name of a corporation Charlene and Ricky had formed for tax purposes.

  Conceivably RKI could find me here, but it would take them longer than I intended to stay.

  After catching the cab at Paoli’s Restaurant, I’d had the driver take me to the Westgate Hotel downtown. I entered by a side door, crossed the lobby, and at the main entrance hailed a second cab. That one took me to the Hilton at Mission Bay, where I waited half an hour, then took another cab here. Three different cab companies, three different pickup points, and none of the drivers had seen me catch my next ride.

  Now that I was here, transportation would pose no problem. During my most recent conversation with my brother John, who lived in nearby Lemon Grove, he mentioned that he’d stored his four-wheel-drive International Scout in Pa’s garage. The problem of having too many vehicles and too much junk in one’s garage should be called McCone’s Syndrome, and John freely admitted to suffering from it. I was welcome, he told me, to use the Scout the next time I visited Pa. Again a tendency toward paranoia, which my big brother also freely admitted to having inherited from Pa, was working in my favor: should RKI go looking for any relatives of mine in the area, they wouldn’t find John; his home, telephone, and vehicles were all under the name of his house-painting company, Mr. Paint.

  Now I pushed away from the sink, took the garage keys from the drawer where they were kept, and went outside. The garage stood at the far end of the property, beyond a bedroom wing that extended from the original house. The house, I reflected as I made my way through the dark backyard, had always possessed a peculiar chameleonlike quality. It had gone from being a small two-bedroom rancher on a large lot to a sprawling five-bedroom architectural horror that ate up the land on either side of the original structure. Baths had been added; the kitchen had been moved twice; a family room had been added, then turned into a bedroom, and a second family room had been built behind it. Rooms changed function and occupant so fast that you needed a chart to keep track of them, and in the end both the floor plan and the exterior only dimly resembled what the builder had intended.

  The normal family would have been driven crazy by the constant upheaval, but since a state of good mental health hadn’t prevailed in the first place, the McCones blithely accepted chaos as the status quo. So what, Ma claimed, if you absentmindedly went to what used to be the kitchen for a midnight snack and instead found yourself in your older brother’s room, surrounded by a dozen pubescent boys leering at your shorty pajamas? Frequent change, my seafaring father claimed, was a good character-building experience.

  Was it any wonder I’d chafed every moment my earthquake cottage was under renovation?

  I was crossing the patio that stretched between the family room and the fence at the finger canyon’s edge when I stopped suddenly, alerted to something unfamiliar. I looked around, didn’t see anything at first. What …? Oh, no—Pa had filled in and paved over the swimming pool!

  Of course, it had never functioned as a real pool, had been defective when Ma and Pa bought the house, and a sonic boom from a jet out of NAS Miramar had finished it. But for years it had made a splendid vegetable garden, well drained and full of rich earth we’d had trucked in to cover the rubble. Now—where once tomatoes, eggplants, corn, melons, and a riot of beans, peas, and zucchini had grown—there was nothing but concrete. I stood dumbfounded, my foot scuffing at the recently poured white surface.

  What next? I thought.

  I continued on to the garage and opened its side door with some trepidation. But there was nothing bizarre inside, just Pa’s covered cabinetmaking equipment and a full range of symptoms of McCone’s Syndrome, crammed from floor to rafters. John’s red Scout was nosed into the last empty space. I went over there and slipped inside, discoveri
ng the keys were in the ignition and the registration and insurance card in the glove compartment. In a plastic recycling bin bolted down in the rear carrying space were flares, a first-aid kit, Thomas Brothers guides, and a jug of drinking water. Three sleeping bags were wedged into the wheel wells. I checked the gas, oil, and battery and found them in good working order.

  How unlike John, I thought. I knew that in recent years my big, brawling brother—who had seen the inside of as many jail cells as Hy—had undergone a startling metamorphosis into responsible business owner and part-time single father, but I never could think of him in his new form. To me he’d remained the incorrigible who’d begun his impious career by being expelled from Catholic school at age nine and more or less culminated it by blowing up his wife’s empty car the night she announced she was leaving him. Now, apparently, I would have to recast that image.

  Back in the house, the kitchen clock showed three-ten. That couldn’t be! I checked my watch. Oh, yes, it could, and I wasn’t a bit sleepy. Also, I had another task to accomplish.

  For as long as I could remember, Pa had kept his .45 Smith & Wesson revolver in a lockbox under a pile of old towels on the top shelf of the linen closet. I went there and dragged it down. Finding the key to the box was no problem; Pa thought he’d secreted it ingeniously, but he hadn’t counted on having a budding detective in the family. Since I was fifteen I’d known it was taped to the bottom of his nightstand drawer. I got it, took the gun out, checked its condition. Then, in yet a third hiding place under the kitchen sink, I found ammunition. I loaded the gun and placed it in my bag.

  By now I was more awake than ever. Finally I went to the kitchen, found a bottle of wine in the fridge, and with glass in hand began to prowl through the house, checking doors and windows. Dust in the dining room. No furniture in the living room—that had gone to Rancho Bernardo with Ma. The bedrooms, even Pa’s, contained so few traces of their former occupants that they might as well have been motel rooms. Mine made me particularly sad, even though the things I cared about from my childhood were now stored in my garage in San Francisco. So sad, in fact, that I knew I couldn’t sleep there. I pulled the quilts and pillows off the bed, shut the door, and dragged them down the hall to the couch in the family room.