McCone and Friends

by Marcia Muller

“So what d’you think?” Chris asked.

  I said, “Good sound tone.”

  Neal said, “The price is kind of steep for us, though.”

  Chris said, “I’ll throw in a box of extra 78’s.”

  Neal said, “I don’t know…”

  And then Shar wandered back over. “What’s with the tape?” she asked Chris. “And what’s with the guy on the other side of it?”

  Neal looked as if he wanted to strangle her. I stifled a moan. A model of subtlety, Shar, and right when we were trying to strike a deal.

  Chris grimaces. “That’s my partner of many years, Ira Sloan. We’ve agreed to disagree. The tape’s my way of indicating my displeasure with him.”

  “Disagree over what?”

  “This hotel. We jointly inherited it six months ago from Tom Atwater. Did either of you guys know him?”

  I shook my head, but Neal nodded. He said, “I met him.” Grinned at me and added, “Twice.”

  “Well,” Chris said, “Tom was an old friend. In fact, he introduced Ira and me, nearly twenty years ago. When he left the place to us we said, ‘What a great way to get out of the city, have our own business in an area that’s experiencing a renaissance.’ So we sold our city house, moved up here, called in the contractors, and got estimates of what it would take to go upscale and reopen. The building’s run down, but the construction’s solid. All it needs outside is a new roof and paint job. The cottages were swept away in the floods, but eventually they can be rebuilt. Inside here, all it would take is redecorating, a new chimney and fireplace in the common room on the other side, and updated kitchen equipment. So then what does my partner decide to do?”

  All three of us shook our heads, caught up in his breathless monologue.

  “My loving partner decides we’re to do nothing. Even though we’ve got more than enough money to fix the place up, he wants to leave it as is and live out our golden years here in Faulkneresque splendor and while it falls down around us!”

  Neal and I looked properly horrified, but Shar asked, “So why’d you put up the tape?” maybe a single-minded focus is an asset in a private investigator, but it seems to me it plays hell with interpersonal relations.

  Chris wanted to talk about the tape, however. “Ira and I divided the place, straight down the middle. He took the common room, utility room, and the area on the floors above it. I took the restaurant, kitchen, bar and above. I prepare the meals and slip his under the tape on the reception desk. He washes our clothes and pushes mine over here to me. I’ll tell you, it’s quite a life!”

  “And in the meantime, you’re selling off the fixtures in your half?”

  “Only the ones that won’t fit the image I want to create here.”

  “How can you create it in half a hotel?”

  “I can’t, but I’m hoping Ira’ll come around eventually. I wish I knew why he has this tic about keeping the place the way it is. If I did, I know I could talk him out of the notion.”

  Shar was looking thoughtful now. She walked around the jukebox, examining its lovely lines and gnawing at her lower lip. She peered through the glass at the turntable where the 78 of “You Belong to Me” now rested silently. She glanced through the archway at the yellow plastic tape.

  “Chris,” she said, “what would it be worth to you to find out what Ira’s problem is?”

  “A lot.”

  “A reduction of price on this jukebox to one my friends can afford?”

  I couldn’t believe it! Yes, she was offering out of the goodness of her heart, because she’d seen how badly Neal and I wanted the jukebox, and she knew the limits of our budget. But she was also doing it because she never can resist a chance to play detective.

  Chris looked surprised, then grinned. “A big reduction, but I don’t see how—”

  She took one of her business cards from her purse and handed it to him. Said to me, “Come on, Watson. The game’s afoot.”

  “Mr. Sloan?” Shar was standing at the tape on the porch. I was trying to hide behind her.

  Ira Sloan’s eyes flicked toward us, than straight ahead.

  “Oh, Mr. Sloan!” now she was waving, for heaven’s sake, as if he wasn’t sitting a mere five feet away!

  His scowl deepened.

  Shar stepped over the tape. “Mr. Sloan, d’you suppose you could give Ted and me a tour of your side of the hotel? We love old places like this, and we both think it’s a shame your partner wants to spoil it.”

  He turned his head, looking skeptical but not as ferocious.

  Shar reached back and yanked on my arm so hard that I almost tripped over the tape. “Ted’s partner, Neal, is in there with Chris, talking upscale. I had to remove Ted before they end up with a tape down the middle of their apartment.”

  Ira Sloan ran his hand through his longish hair and stood up. He was very tall—at least six-four and so skinny he seemed to have no ass at all. Had he always been so thin, or was it the result of too many cooling meals shoved across the reception desk?

  He said, “The tape was his idea.”

  “So he told us.”

  “Thinks it’s funny.”

  “It’s not.”

  “I like people who appreciate old things. It’ll be a pleasure to show you around.”

  The common room was full of big maple furniture with wide wooden arms and thick floral chintz-covered cushions, faded now. The chairs and sofas would’ve been fashionable in the thirties and forties, campy in the seventies. Now they just looked tired. Casement windows overlooked the lawn and the river, and on the far side of the room was a deep stone fireplace whose chimney showed chinks where the mortar had crumbled. Against the stones hung an oval stained-glass panel in muddy looking colors. It reminded me of the stone in one of those mood rings that were popular in the seventies.

  By the time we’d inspected the room, Shar and Ira Sloan were chattering up a storm. By the time we got upstairs to the guestrooms, they were old friends.

  The guestrooms were furnished with waterbeds, another icon of the sybaritic decade. Now their mattresses were shriveled like used condoms. The suites had Jacuzzi tubs set before the windows, once brightly colored porcelain, but now rust-stained and grimy. The balconies off the third-story rooms were narrow and cobwebby, and the webbing on their lounge chairs had been stripped away, probably by nesting birds.

  Shar asked, “How long was the hotel in operation?”

  “Tom closed it in ‘eighty-three.”

  “Why?”

  “Declining business. By then…well, a lot of things were over.”

  It made me so sad. The Riverside Hotel’s brief time in the sun had been a wild, tumultuous, drug-hazed era—but also curiously innocent. A time of experimentation and new found freedom. A time to adopt new lifestyles without fear of reprisal. But now the age of innocence was over, harsh reality had set in. Many of the men who had stayed here were dead, many others decaying like this structure.

  Why would Ira Sloan want to keep intact his monument to the death of happiness?

  Back downstairs Shar whispered to me, “Stay here. Talk with him.” Then she was gone into the reception room and over the tape.

  I turned trying to think of something to say to Ira Sloan, but he’d vanished into some dark corner of the haunted place. Possibly to commune with his favorite ghost. I sat down on one of the chairs amid a cloud of rising dust to see if he’d return. Against the chimney the stained-glass mood-ring stone seemed to have darkened. My mood darkened with it. I wanted out of this place and into the sun.

  In about ten minutes Ira Sloan still hadn’t reappeared. I heard a rustling behind the reception desk. Shar—who else? She was removing a ledger from a drawer under the warning tape and spreading it open.

  “Well, that’s interesting.” She muttered after a couple of minutes. “Very interesting.”

  A little while more and she shut the ledger and stuffed it into her tote bag. Smiled at me and said, “Let’s go now. You look as though you can use some of
my famous sourdough loaf and a walk by the sea.”

  When we were ensconced on the sand with our repast spread before us, I asked Shar, “What’d you take from the desk?”

  “The guest register.” She pulled it from her tote and handed it to me.

  “You stole it?”

  Her mouth twitched—a warning sign. “Borrowed it, with Chris’ permission.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, then I went back to talk with him some more, I asked how the two of them decided who got what. He said Ira insisted on his side of the hotel, and Chris was glad to divide it that way because he likes to cook.”

  Neal poured wine into plastic glasses and handed them around. “Bizarre arrangement, if you ask me.”

  Shar was cutting the sourdough loaf, in imminent danger of sawing off a finger as well. I took the knife from her and performed culinary surgery.

  “Anyway,” she went on, ‘then I asked Chris if Ira had insisted on getting anything else. He said only the guest register. But by then Chris’d gotten his back up, and he pointed out that the ledger was kept in a drawer of the desk that’s bisected by the tape. So they agreed to leave it there and hold it in common. Ira wasn’t happy with the arrangement.”

  I filled paper plates with slices of the loaf. Its delicious aroma was quickly dispelling my hotel-inducted funk.

  “And did the register tell you anything?” Neal asked. “Only that somebody—I assume Ira—tore the page out for the week of August 13, 1978. Recently.”

  “How d’you know it was recent?”

  “Fresh tears look different than old ones. The edges of these aren’t browning.” She flipped the book open to where the pages were missing.

  “So now what?”

  “I try to find out who was there and what happened that week. Maybe someone well known who was still in the closet stayed there. Or somebody who was with a jealous person he wasn’t supposed to be.”

  She stabbed her finger at the first column on the ledger page, then at the last. “Date checked in, date checked out. Five individuals who checked in before the thirteenth checked out on the eighteenth. My job for this weekend it to try to locate and talk with them.”

  “Hey, Ted, come along with me!”

  Shar was in the driver’s seat of the agency van parked on the floor of Pier 24 ½, where we have our offices. I was dragging tail down the iron stairway from the second level, intent on heading home after a perfectly outlandish Monday. I went over to the van and leaned in the open window. “What’s happening?”

  “With any luck, you and I are going to collect your jukebox this evening and have it back at your place by the time Neal closes the store.” Anachronism, Neal’s used bookstore, is open till nine on Mondays.

  I jumped into the van, the day’s horrors forgotten. “You find out what Ira Sloan’s problem is?”

  “Some of it. The rest is about to unfold.”

  I got my seatbelt on just as she swerved into traffic on the waterfront boulevard outside the pier. Thanked God I was firmly strapped in, a grocery sack no longer.

  The house was on a quiet street on the west side of Petaluma, a small city some forty minutes north of the Golden Gate. It used to be called the Egg Basket of the World, before the chicken boom went bust. From what I hear lately, it’s turning into Yuppie Heaven.

  As we got out of the van I looked up at the gray Victorian. It had a wide porch, high windows, and a fan-like pediment over the door that was painted in the colors of the rainbow. This, Shar had told me, was the home of Mark Curry, one of the men who had stayed at the Riverside during the second week of August, 1978. Surprisingly, given the passage of time, she’d managed to locate three of the five who’d signed the register before the missing week, and to interview two so far.

  “Ted,” she said, “how long have gays been doing that rainbow thing?”

  “You mean the flags and all? Funny—since 1978. The first rainbow flag was designed by a San Francisco artist, Gilbert Baker, as a sign of the gay community’s solidarity. A version of it was flown in the next year’s Pride Parade.”

  “I didn’t realize it went back that far.” She started up the walk, and I followed.

  The man who answered the door was slender and handsome, with a fine-boned face and a diamond stud in one nostril, and a full head of wavy gray hair that threatened to turn me green with envy. His wood-paneled parlor made me envision too: full of Chippendale furniture, with a gilt harp in the front window. Mark Curry seated us there, offered coffee, and went to fetch it.

  Shar saw the way I was looking at the room. “It’s not you,” she said. “In a room like this that jukebox would look—”

  “Like a wart on the face of an angel. But in our place—”

  “It’ll still look like a trashcan.”

  Mark Curry came back with a silver coffee service, and got down to business while he poured. “After you phoned. Ms McCone, I got in touch with Chris Fowler. He’s an old friend, from the time we worked as volunteers at an AIDS hospice. He vouched for you, so I dug out my journal for 1978 and refreshed my memory about August’s stay at the Riverside.”

  “You arrived there August eleventh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Alone?”

  “No, with my then partner, Dave Howell. He’s been dead…do you believe nearly sixteen years now?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks. Sometimes it seems like yesterday.”

  “Were you and Mr. Howell staying in a cottage or the main building?”

  “Main building, third floor, river side. Over the bar.”

  “D’you recall who else was there?”

  “Well, the place was always full in the summertime, and a lot of the men I didn’t know. And even more people came in over the weekend. There was to be a canoeing regatta on Wednesday the sixteenth, with a big barbecue on the beach that evening, and they were gearing up for it.”

  I said, “Canoeing regatta?”

  Mark Curry winked at me. “A bunch of guys, stoned and silly, banging into each other and capsizing and having a great time of it.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  Shar said, “So who do you remember?”

  “Well, Tom Atwater, of course. His lover, Bobby Gardena, showed up on Tuesday. Bobby had a house in the city, divided his time between there and the river. Ira Sloan, one of Tom’s best friends, and the guy who inherited that white elephant along with Chris. He was alone, had just broken off a relationship, and seemed pretty unhappy, but a few months later Tom introduced him to Chris, and they’ve been together ever since. Then there was Sandy Janssen. Darryl Williams. And of course there was…”

  Shar dutifully noted the names, but I sensed she’d lost interest in them. No well known who customarily hid in the closet, no scandalous mispairing. When Mark Curry ran out of people, she said, “Tell me about the week of the thirteenth. Did anything out of the ordinary happen?”

  Mark Curry laughed. “Out of the ordinary was de rigeur at the Riverside.”

  “More out of the ordinary than usual.”

  Her serious—and curiously intense—tone sobered him. He stared into his coffee cup, recapturing his memories. When he spoke, his voice was subdued.

  “The night of the regatta, you know? Everybody was on the beach, carrying on till all hours. A little before two Dave and I decided we wanted to have a couple of quiet drinks alone, so we slipped away from the party. I remember walking up the slope from the beach and across the lawn to the hotel. Everything was so quiet. I suppose it was just the contrast to the commotion on the beach, but it gave me the shivers. Dave, too. And when we went inside, it was still quiet, but…”

  “But what, Mr. Curry?”

  “There was a …an undercurrent. A sense of whispers and footfalls, but you couldn’t really identify whose or where they were. Like something was going on, but not really. You know how that can be?”

  Shar’s face was thoughtful. She’s had a lot of unusual experiences in her life, and
I was sure she did know how that could be.

  Mark Curry added, “Dave and I went into the bar and sat down. Nobody came. We were about to make our own drinks—you could do that, so long as signed a chit—when Ira Sloan stepped out of the kitchen and told us the bar was closed.”

  “But this was after legal closing time.”

  He shook his head. “The bar at the Riverside never closed. It was immune from the dictates of the state lawmakers—some of whom were its frequent patrons.”

  “I see. Did Ira give you any explanation?”

  “No. He asked if we wanted to buy a bottle, so we did, and took it up to our room and consumed it on our balcony. And all night the noisy party on the beach went on. But the quiet in the hotel was louder than any cacophony I’ve ever experienced.”

  When we got back to the van, Shar took out her phone and made a call. “Hi, Mick,” she said.

  “Anything?”

  Mick Savage, her nephew, computer specialist, and fastest skip tracer in the west.

  “I see…Uh-huh…Right…No evidence about a gas leak on Friday the eighteenth?...Yes, I thought as much…No, nothing else. And thanks.”

  She broke the conversation, stuffed the phone back into her bag, and looked at me. Her expression was profoundly sad.

  “You’ve got yourself a jukebox,” she said.

  “Before I got into this,” Shar said to Chris Fowler, “There’s something I ought to say.”

  The three of us were seated at a table in the bar at the Riverside. The dim lighting made Chris look curiously young and hopeful.

  “Secrets,” Shar went on, “are not necessarily harmful, so long as they remain secrets. But once you put them into words, they can’t be taken back. Ever.”

  Chris nodded. “I understand what you’re trying to tell me, but I need to know.”

  “All right, then. I spoke with three men who were present at the hotel on Wednesday, August 16, 1978. Each gave me bits and pieces of a story, that led me to suspect what happened. A check I had run on a fourth man pretty much confirmed my suspicions.”

  On August sixteenth of that year, a canoeing regatta was held at this hotel—a big yearly event. The cottages and rooms were all full, but we’re only concerned with a few people: Tom Atwater and his lover Bobby Gardena. Ira. And my witnesses: Mark Curry, Darryl Williams, and Sandy Janssen.