Lostart Street
a novel of mystery, murder, and moonbeams
By
Vinnie Hansen
Published by misterio press
Copyright 2017 by Vinnie Hansen
All rights reserved under international and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information contact [email protected].
This is a work of fiction. While some real locations have been used, they have been used fictitiously. All the characters and incidents in this work are products of the author’s imagination. Not a single occurrence actually happened, or if it did, not at the time or in the context or with the people or in the manner depicted. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is entirely coincidental.
Cover art & map by Book Cover Corner
Photo work by Crystal Edwards
Background art in photo by Daniel S. Friedman
ALSO BY
VINNIE HANSEN:
Murder, Honey
One Tough Cookie
Rotten Dates
Tang Is Not Juice
Death with Dessert
Art, Wine & Bullets
For June Kono, master teacher extraordinaire, who with grace, dignity and professionalism prepared me for a career in education.
Lostart Street
a novel of mystery, murder, and moonbeams
By
Vinnie Hansen
1982
The Barracks
Not a soul stirred except the two of us. The mustard-colored apartment units could have been empty.
“It’s quiet,” I murmured.
“Yes, very quiet.” The manager, Bobbi Headland, was a tiny woman with tinted red hair and spiky eyelashes. Humans are already anatomical wonders, slender stalks balancing twenty-pound heads. Bobbi Headland added to this miracle with twiggy legs and large, Barbie-doll breasts. As we walked up the asphalt drive, all logic argued she should tip over, which perhaps accounted for her charged up, nervous air.
The alluring quiet of the place contrasted sharply with my life of MUNI buses rumbling past the flat I rented with my friend Imogene. Behind the three rows of apartments, birds fluttered in the ice plant covering a hill. A song sparrow on the tip of a stunted juniper threw open his beak and shattered the silent heat.
A humongous cat on the step of unit four, next to the vacant one, lazily lifted its head to acknowledge us.
“Hi ya, Buddha Belly,” Bobbi Headland chirped. “That’s Mrs. Bean’s cat and folks here call it Buddha Belly. Not in front of Mrs. Bean, of course. She’s very sensitive about her cat.”
The vacant apartment and Mrs. Bean’s stood alone, like individual houses. A nice feature.
Bobbi threw open the door. I weighed the plusses and minuses of the place: clean with new carpet and knotty pine in a minuscule kitchen. The rent was unreasonable, but affordable given my new salary. And with my first day as a high-school teacher looming in two days, I had no time to shop. I still faced the move from San Francisco.
As I peeked about, Bobbi scrutinized the place as though trying to fathom what a single, twenty-eight-year-old would want in such a dead place. Why not choose hip downtown Santa Cruz instead of this little village? She chattered away, giving me the history of the apartments and telling me about the woman who lived across the asphalt drive in unit six. “She doesn’t come out much in the day. You might not ever see her.”
I should have paid more attention to this information, but it winged by.
Bobbi ducked into what I’d already decided was my bathroom. She stayed for a long time, but emerged seeming calmer. I should have paid more attention to that, too.
Moving in, the Sunday before my new job started, I saw the first sign of human life, two boys playing catch on one of the two driveways.
“Come on, man. Throw it right here.” The chubby boy farthest from my back unit was about thirteen. He squatted and pounded the glove held to his crotch. “Aim at my nuts!”
After several trips from my Volkswagen bug to the apartment and back, I realized the “boy” nearer my unit was a mentally retarded man. He threw the ball fairly well, but the teen bobbled it.
“Jethuth Crith, you’re thupposed to catch it,” the older guy said.
“You were supposed to throw it at my balls, not at my chest.”
The boy waddled after the ball rolling down the drive toward Lostart Street. “You know where my balls are, Bucky?” He scooped the baseball into his gloved hand, turned toward Bucky, grabbed his crotch and shook the handful at him.
A high, wild throw arced toward Bucky and I said a prayer for my Volkswagen’s windows. The ball crashed against the roof of a prim tan Dodge Dart parked in the carport next to mine. Buddha Belly rose from his pose on the porch next door as the screen door violently opened and Mrs. Bean limped onto her steps.
Her right leg bent inward, as if it had been hit from the side by a truck. Vicious eczema riddled the thin skin of her arms, face and hands. Apparently she had once been buxom because now, the supportive muscle gone and the sustaining fat dissolved, her breasts hung at her waist beneath a floral-print polyester blouse. Dark, wrap-around sunglasses obscured the top half of her face.
“This is a private driveway,” she yelled at the boys, “not a public park. You break a window with that ball and I’ll call the police.”
“If I break a window, I’ll pay for it,” the boy said.
In spite of his snotty tone and pubescent fascination with body parts, I thought his comment showed some maturity.
“You break a window around here and you’ll go to Juvenile Hall. They’ll put you in jail all right. I have an uncle on the Po-lice Force.”
Mrs. Bean looked too old to have an uncle anywhere. In spite of her sharp tongue, her decrepit body inspired pathos rather than fear.
Bucky and the boy trudged toward the street, muttering about “Old String Bean.”
I soon discovered Mrs. Bean would gimp faithfully past my window every day to start and rev up her Dodge Dart. She didn’t seem to notice me even when I was standing on my landing, but one day as I bent over, wiping aphids from my new pansies in a redwood bucket, my butt stuck in her unwavering path, her cane struck my foot, her fragile body tumbled against mine, and she regained her balance by clutching my buttocks.
“Oh, my new neighbor,” she exclaimed, sounding delighted. “What is your name?”
“Cecile Knutsen.”
“What kind of name is that?”
“It’s a pain in the butt name. People don’t put the final e on Cecile, or they call me Cecilia, or they pronounce it Sa-seal instead of See-sill.”
“Would you like to have coffee with me?”
Although sure I would not, I couldn’t find any ready excuse to decline the invitation.
She apologized for her poor eyesight, giving the whole history of her cataracts, the reason for her odd sunglasses. She introduced me to Buddha Belly whom she called “Buttons.” Grasping her step railing, she stooped to scratch behind the cat’s ears. It lethargically opened its eyes in acknowledgment and then they drooped shut again. “He’s a Himalayan,” she said, opening her screen, “although some people say Himalayan. Now, which do you think is right?”
The question tickled my English teacher love for words, unsuspecting as I was that Mrs. Bean’s story of her cat would be replayed many times, with no variation of detail, with seldom a slip of word, and always, no matter how many times I had answered it, with the same question, as if the story were taped in her brain.
On this first innocent visit, though, as she shakily poured boiling water into the instan
t coffee, and I restrained my anxiety that she would miss the mugs, the Himalayan vs. Himalayan question sucked me in. I held forth on how people pronounce Berlin, a New Hampshire town, as they would the Berlin in Germany, while natives of the state pronounced it “BARlin.”
With her hand rocking, Mrs. Bean served me the coffee, not spilling a drop. Under the small table between her two chairs, a rectangle had been cut in the floor as though someone had thought about installing a floor furnace, but then changed his mind. It seemed like spiders or worse might climb up through the opening, but I didn’t say anything.
Mrs. Bean lowered herself into the other plush chair, releasing its odor of stale confinement, and continued her cat story as if I hadn’t uttered a word.
“He’s pedigreed,” she announced. “Worth about two hundred dollars.”
The cat had been given up by its owners. Actually, the people had liked the cat, but they were moving to France and did not want to see the animal suffer the long quarantine, shots, and trauma. Thus, “Buttons” had come to Mrs. Bean many years ago.
On the second cup of coffee, she told me about the burglary. Her story started by her showing me a carved black walnut box that had belonged to her grandmother. In the box had been a set of diamond jewelry: a ring, necklace and earrings.
“I keep all my jewelry in there, so I knew right away when they were gone.”
“Did you call the police?”
“Of course.” She slurped her coffee. “But there was no sign of forced entry. They told me it would be impossible to lift prints from the box.”
“Did the thief take anything else?”
She shook her head. “You sound like the po-lice.” She pushed up her cataract glasses with her middle finger, which was a little disconcerting.
I wondered if the diamonds could be Mrs. Bean’s imagination, a memory given away long ago to a niece. If they actually existed, the theft sounded like an inside job, the work of a “friend” or relative. I chewed my lip. If neither of these were the case, and there’d been a random burglar, the isolation and quiet of my new apartment might not be so great after all.
An Old Story
On the night before my first day of teaching, I tried to go to bed—a sleeping bag on the bedroom floor—at nine o’clock. I wanted to be up at five thirty to dress my best in my new skirt and jacket, before I drove the twenty-minute commute. I planned to be at work by seven, giving me an hour to find out what and where I’d be teaching, before the meetings started at eight. Teachers were supposed to have the afternoon free to prepare before the students arrived on Tuesday. But I didn’t count on it. If I’d learned anything during my training, it was that faculty meetings ran forever.
At ten thirty I gave up on sleeping and wormed out of my cocoon. I meandered to the kitchen and heated up a saucepan of warm milk. I poured in a bit of vanilla, one of the staples I’d brought with me from The City.
Sipping scalded milk from my sole mug, I sat at my little typing table. I peered out the curtainless window at the quiet drive, illuminated by the streetlight over the dumpster. Bobbi had told me these apartments had been motel units, salvaged from the Santa Cruz flood of 1955, and relocated to this remote plot. They were subsidized for rental to the elderly and handicapped, but a recent bureaucratic change made it possible for the owner to rent to others. I was the second integrator after Vince in unit one. “About your age.” Bobbi had pointed out, arching a sandy brow.
I wedged the mug next to my IBM Selectric and ran my hand over the top of the gray typewriter. This gift from Angelo, one of the nicest things I owned, testified to my vision of myself as a writer. A deep sorrow welled up inside of me. Now I’d be using it to create lesson plans.
I’d left my file cabinet in San Francisco, but hadn’t been able to abandon my stories there. From the box under the table, I extracted a cathartic piece.
Stain
I dream I have a re-live machine. It looks like Angelo’s garage door opener, a little black box with a blue button and a red button. Pressing the red activator button and then the blue rewind button, I slip back in time, ready to rectify my life. I live a little, screw up, and hit the buttons again. Each time I press the buttons sooner, until finally I am nothing but a flash, like a sparkler twirled in the dark.
Outside my bare window, the streetlight developed a fuzzy halo. A tear dripped down my cheek. Not for the sadness of the botched operation, the bleeding that lasted for months, but for the end of my life as a writer and for the new life I would begin the next morning at five thirty.
Gossip
My job consumed every moment from waking until bedtime. The school had assigned me to teach four different courses in three different classrooms. The mental shift from class to class and the physical move from room to room required all my concentration and caffeine-fueled energy.
My first class, General English I, met in Annette’s classroom. The room looked like a Scholastic Magazine had exploded, plastering the walls with colorful posters about books. I loved the room except there wasn’t an inch of space for anything particular to my class.
On day one, Annette squeaked across the linoleum in her sneakers and pushed her record book to the side of the lectern, clearing a foot-wide space. “You can set up here.” Annette was about my height, five foot six, but she had a square jaw and a build that suggested she could pick up an unruly student and use him for a caber toss.
“Thanks.” My shaky hands sought my tight little bun of hair, meant to make me look less young. I secured bobby pins that had worked loose.
The frown lines deepened between Annette’s eyes. Retrieving her coffee mug and a stack of papers, she settled her jean-clad butt at the teacher’s desk.
After I greeted students at the door and got them seated, I pointed to my name written in cursive on the chalkboard. “I’m Ms. Knutsen. Just remember the Kn makes the K sound, Kuh, then it’s newt like a salamander, and then sen. Kuh-newt-sen.”
A kid with a fresh haircut and a body like a small tank blurted, “So what is the Ms. part? Does that mean you’re married or what?”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Ruben.”
“Ruben, Ms. means that my marital status is not your concern.” I bit my lip. Glanced at Annette.
I could have been married now, living an entirely different life, if I’d insisted upon having the baby. But Angelo didn’t want a baby, and I didn’t want him to marry me because I was knocked up. I wanted to be married to a man who loved me, who couldn’t live without me. That turned out not to be Angelo. He was expected to marry a Greek girl, and with a name like Knutsen, I was anything but.
I turned abruptly and grabbed my directions for an icebreaking activity. Handing out the papers, I passed Annette’s desk.
“Psssst.”
I leaned down.
“Skip the salamander,” she whispered. “You’re confusing them.”
The second day, I administered a reading test and learned that my general English classes contained students below fourth-grade reading level all the way to students who read off the top of the test’s scale—post high school. In only two days I saw a multitude of reasons why the high scorers were in the low track—arriving at school without even a pencil—only bad attitudes, weak past performances, and boredom. But they weren’t as worrisome as the kids whose reading had never made it to chapter books. How did I break down high school material for them?
In my freshman class I used the test scores to create groups for cooperative work, not a topic that had come up in my interview. Since I was inexperienced, the two administrators had concentrated their questions on Assertive Discipline.
After I read the names for each cooperative group, a skinny girl named Rosaura piped up, “Ms. Knutsen, how’d you make these groups? One smart person, two normal ones and one dumb?”
I already liked this girl with her snapping black eyes and spunk. Arms folded over a faded sweatshirt, she waited for my response.
Ruben, as
signed to her group, said to Rosaura, “If that’s the way, which one are you? The dumb one?”
Rosaura leaned over to punch his shoulder, which made him giggle.
“Stop,” I commanded, but Rosaura lunged out of her seat and Ruben tipped away from her until his whole desk threatened to fall sideways.
Rosaura satisfied herself with one more slug to his shoulder. Ruben laughed harder.
I was relieved to have escaped her question and thankful Rosaura had not pointed out the obvious—that Ruben was the “dumb” one. He was a repeater, a student who was supposed to be a sophomore, but had failed most of his classes the previous year.
The view of the part in Annette’s short salt-and-pepper hair had turned into a view of her face. I blushed that she’d witnessed my lack of classroom control. She rolled her eyes. She didn’t believe in “group work” to begin with.
As I whizzed by her desk on the way to my next classroom, she whispered up to me, “Remember, Kiddo, don’t smile ’til Christmas.”
That night I first spotted Alice, from unit nine, and her dog, Dudu, during their evening circuit around the apartments—Alice, big and booming and cheerful, and Dudu, small and quiet and cute. The dog sniffed and marked the uprights in his kingdom. With shaggy hair and a lolling pink tongue, Dudu seemed appropriate for a two-year-old’s birthday card, which made me think Alice might be childish. I resolved not to have a pet; the choice was too revealing.
On weekend days, Alice and Dudu’s path didn’t waver, so I assumed they paraded the same route when I was gone, too. Every evening they stopped across from my apartment to talk through the window to The Invisible Lady. Alice’s head tipped back as all of our apartments were a step up from the asphalt.
“How you doin’ in there?” Alice sang.
There was an inaudible reply.
“Well, hang in there. You know we love you.” Alice would blow a kiss through the window.
Alice and Dudu were very popular with a steady stream of visitors to their apartment. I felt envious.
One day toward the end of my first two weeks, a blue van followed my Volkswagen down Lostart Street and stopped by Alice’s. Naturally snoopy, I watched from my carport to see who was visiting. Eight big, burly guys, tough-looking like some of Alice’s usual visitors, spilled from the van. They put on blue slinky jackets with POLICE stenciled across the chests and I thought it must be some kind of joke or something for television. Then they pulled out their guns and unloaded a German shepherd and camera equipment. About an hour later, they emerged, carrying stuff, but without Alice. No crowd gathered until they departed. I didn’t feel enough a part of the community to join in. Instead, I went to the laundry room in the evening to see Florence.
Lostart Street Page 1