Paper Phoenix: A Mystery of San Francisco in the '70s (A Classic Cozy--with Romance!) (2 page)

Richard was nothing if not civilized, so he had waited until after I had my first cup of coffee, and told me over the raisin toast as we sat at the kitchen table having breakfast. Picking up crumbs and rolling them between his fingers, he broke out phrases like “better for both of us,” and “well taken care of,” and “haven’t really communicated in years.” There wasn’t a word about his law student lady friend. I truly don’t remember the occasion very well, even now.

Once he said, “Can’t you understand, Maggie?” and reached out to touch my arm. I pulled back as if he had scalded me and knocked a jar of quince preserves off the table. Typical of Richard, to let other people make his messes for him while he watched, bemused at their clumsiness. As well as I remember, I hadn’t said a word up until then, except a polite “You are?” when he said he was going. After the preserves jar broke, it seemed extremely important that it be cleaned up thoroughly and immediately. While I got up for paper towels, the phone rang.

There’s an extension in the kitchen, but Richard said, vehemently, “God damn it to hell!” and went to answer it in the study— glad, no doubt, to escape the sight of me bending pathetically over the preserves. When the floor was clean, I looked around for him. I must have been in shock, because I had forgotten about the phone call, and when I didn’t see him it occurred to me that perhaps, having informed me of his intentions, he had simply left, not feeling the need for further elucidation. Dazed, I wandered into the living room and heard his voice coming from the study. I stood in the study door and saw Richard standing next to the desk, his back to me. His voice was irritated, emphatic. He said, “Sure, I agree Larry Hawkins is a pain in the ass. But you can absolutely take my word for it, we won’t have to worry about him much longer.” I turned around and walked back to the kitchen.

Now, I picked up the paper and read Larry’s obituary one more time. We won’t have to worry about him much longer. No. We certainly won’t.

I didn’t let myself think about it any longer, as if I had looked straight at the sun and didn’t want to look again. I followed the rest of my daily routine carefully. Because I was still a little ahead of time, the evening pill had made me sleepy enough that I could reasonably switch off the television before the eleven-o’clock news, thus avoiding possible reminders of Larry’s fate.

I moved through the next day like the zombie I was. It wasn’t until slightly more than twenty-four hours after I had first read it that I walked back out on the sun porch and saw the previous day’s paper, turned to Larry’s obituary, lying beside my chair. I was overwhelmed by a rage so intense that I had to sit down before my knees gave way.

Larry and I had been in the same boat, hadn’t we? Both of us had given Richard Longstreet a pain in the ass, and look at us now. Giving Richard a pain in the ass was obviously hazardous to your health, if not dangerous to your life.

In that bright burst of hatred I never doubted that Richard had somehow maneuvered Larry Hawkins into committing suicide, if he hadn’t literally pushed him out the window. How else could he have been so certain on the telephone? “You can absolutely take my word for it,” he had said. I remembered it more clearly than anything else that had happened that morning.

All at once, I couldn’t sit still. Invigorated by anger, I got up and paced the room, clenching and unclenching my fists. It was so unfair. It was utterly, completely unfair. Things always went Richard’s way. Does a newspaper editor bother you? A few months later he’s dead. Does your wife cramp your style? Kick her aside. Don’t under any circumstances let anything slow you down.

It would be such a satisfaction, just this once, to see him fail to get away with it. It would be the purest joy I could ever know to see him get caught. I stopped walking. It was impossible. There was nothing whatsoever I could do. Nothing. I sat down.

I thought about Larry. I had had only a single real conversation with him, and that took place because we were both somewhat drunk. It was at a fund-raising dinner for a Board of Supervisors candidate, held in a private room at one of the fancy Nob Hill hotels. Because of the terrible pressure of public service, the guest of honor hadn’t shown up yet, and it was getting on for nine-thirty. The hors d’oeuvres trays were ravaged, and since dinner couldn’t be served there was little to do but drink, or put one’s head in an ashtray and go to sleep, or both. Richard was, as usual, deep in a huddle with the few selected bigwigs who could do him the most good, and I had exhausted my small talk. A white wine or even, God help us, some sort of mineral water would have been the trendy tipple, but I decided to continue bucking the trend and went to order another Scotch. Larry Hawkins was leaning against the bar, his corduroy elbow just missing a puddle, and as I picked up my drink I noticed him watching me. He lifted his glass in a mocking little toast and then leaned over and said, “Bunch of turkeys.”

“What?” I said.

He waved his glass, indicating the room, its inhabitants, and part of the ceiling. “Bunch of turkeys, man. Real bunch of turkeys.”

I wasn’t sure if he was insulting the crowd or announcing the menu. “Who is?”

His eyes narrowed. “Who is what?”

“A bunch of turkeys.”

He looked at me glumly and turned away to his drink. “Aw, Christ, it’s hopeless.”

I wasn’t to be put off. “Don’t say it’s hopeless. Just tell me.”

“Can’t you even see?” he said with exasperation. “Whole goddamn room is full of goddamn City Hall turkeys.”

I sipped my drink. He pointed his index finger at me. The nail was chewed to the quick. “You look like an intelligent lady. What the hell are you doing here?”

“I’m married to one of the turkeys.”

He looked sincerely sad. “Jeez,” he said in a tone of regret. “Which one?”

“Richard Longstreet.”

“Oh,
no.”
His voice was a plaintive moan. “Not Redevelopment. God, I don’t believe it.”

At the time, I didn’t appreciate his sympathy. “Yeah. Redevelopment.”

He leaned toward me, full of sincerity. “Lady, if you want to take my advice you’ll stay away from that Redevelopment bunch. I mean, I’m not kidding with you on that one. They’re bad news.” He nodded firmly.

“Thanks for telling me,” I said. “It only comes about twenty years too late.” I took my drink and wavered away from the bar.

Larry had said Redevelopment people were bad news, and he had been right. Now Larry had smashed himself on an alley pavement. That brash little man a suicide? Week after week, he had gone after City Hall corruption, building-code violations, consumer fraud, police department drinking, always with a strident assurance that left no room for self-doubt. Wasn’t self-doubt a requirement for suicide?

You didn’t know Larry, and you don’t know the first thing about it, I chided myself. Wearily, I went to the kitchen to make a cheese sandwich. The bread was slightly stale. As I spread it with mayonnaise, I argued internally. I had heard Richard promise someone that soon Larry wouldn’t bother them again. Richard didn’t know that I had heard him, and I was the only one who had heard him, besides the person at the other end of the line. That was point one.

Slicing the cheese, I went on to point two. If Larry was bothering Richard, it was probably because Richard was doing something Larry planned to expose. I wanted to know what. Had the urbane, unflappable Richard Longstreet made a misstep? Imagining his doing something wrong was easy. I had known for a long time that he was ruthless where his career was concerned. As a poor boy with the manners and tastes of the rich, he had of necessity hardened himself, left some of the virtues behind as excess baggage. Imagining his getting caught doing a wrong act was much more difficult. Richard was clever, and he liked to look good.

I had forgotten to make tea. The kettle would boil in a minute. The truth is, you want revenge, I told myself. There. There it was. I was angry, hurt, bitter, and now I had something that had never before been given to me— a weapon. Furthermore, if Richard
had
done something, something that led to Larry’s death, wouldn’t it be only the right thing to do, the moral thing to do, to find out what it was? To bring about justice? Justice for Larry and justice for me, all in one stroke?

My head was beginning to ache. Bring about justice. Maybe I thought I was Saint George, riding to kill the dragon and rescue the maiden in distress. Whereas actually I was the maiden— make that matron— in distress. In other words, helpless. I ate my sandwich and drank my tea and continued to sit staring at the squeezed-out tea bag in my saucer.

Larry might have been working on a story about Richard and the Redevelopment Agency at the time of his death. If he had been, it would mean— it wouldn’t mean anything. But it
might
mean Richard had done something to Larry. It might. It might mean Richard was as mean a son of a bitch as I thought he was. I’d feel a lot of satisfaction in having my opinion confirmed.

Satisfaction was something I hadn’t had much of lately, and the thought of feeling it again made my head reel faster than any pill ever could. All I really needed to know was what stories Larry had been working on before he went out the window. Suppose I could find out?

I couldn’t find out. No way. I wasn’t Saint George. I was just an ex-political wife, or a political ex-wife. Confined, more or less, to my really rather lovely home.

Well, hell. I could go to the
People’s Times
and
ask
.

I could ask. What harm would it do? They could always tell me to get lost if they didn’t want to say. If having somebody tell me to get lost would kill me, I’d have died after Richard said it.

I must be nuts. Time for a pill.

I could ask. It wouldn’t hurt anything. If I failed, so what? Failure was the story of my life. If I found out Larry had been investigating Richard— well, then I’d know.

Time for a pill.

I cleared away the dishes and sat down for an evening of television.

The
People’s Times
was located in a grimy, dark-red-brick converted warehouse in the shadow of the freeway. Cleveland Street, in the industrial district south of Market Street, was hardly a street at all, but a litter-strewn passage where cars parked with two wheels on the crumbling sidewalks. Although the geographical distance wasn’t great, the atmosphere was completely different from the never-never land north of Market, where legions of visitors regularly left their hearts and discretionary dollars at the garish attractions of Fisherman’s Wharf or Chinatown. Surely nobody wearing white shoes— footgear religiously shunned by true San Franciscans, thus the dead giveaway of a tourist— had ever walked down Cleveland Street.

Was I going to walk down Cleveland Street? My salmon-colored peignoir was hanging on a hook on the bathroom door. I was wearing a blue pantsuit, and my hair was brushed. I had managed to get the car started, drive all the way down here, and park in a vacant lot next to a dented yellow Volkswagen with a
BOYCOTT GALLO
sticker on the rear bumper. Now I was staring across at the building I had planned to enter, all the while clinging to the steering wheel as if it were a life ring somebody had thrown me just before I went down for the third time. On the next street over, trucks roared by on their way to the freeway, adding their fumes to the haze that hung over the morning.

Making the effort to get this far was something already. I could go back home now and feel that I had accomplished the seemingly insurmountable task of getting out of the house. That I should also get out of the car was too much to expect for one day.

To my surprise, I did get out of the car. Standing among broken glass, twisted cigarette packages, and weeds, I continued to stare at the building. The windows were blank and dusty, the dreariness of the facade relieved occasionally by a lopsided fern or an Indian-print bedspread hanging in a window. From somewhere not far away a jackhammer duplicated the pulses I felt in my head.

I was going in. If I weren’t going in, I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble to get dressed, make up a cover story, and unearth the two-year-old notebook— half full of calculus problems from my daughter Candace’s high school days— that I was nervously clutching. I crossed the street.

At close range, the building was even seedier. The outer door listed on its hinges, opening into a foyer that smelled faintly of urine. On a yellowing piece of paper taped to the wall beside the elevator was a heavily amended list of tenants. Coalition for Justice and Equality, Gay Citizens League, Abolish Shock Therapy Now,
People’s Times.
Seventh floor. I wasn’t sure I liked the looks of the elevator, but when I entered and pressed the button the door creaked closed and it rumbled obediently, if slowly, upward.

When the door creaked open again, I stepped out into a musty-smelling hallway illuminated by milky light from a pebbled-glass window at the end. A few yards down on my left, a door stood open and a phone was ringing. Next to the door, someone had written
People’s Times
on the wall in red magic marker. I could still go back. The elevator hadn’t even left yet. But at that moment it began to reverberate, and I stepped into the reception office of the
People’s Times.

My first impression was of paper. All sorts of paper. Tied, piled-up bundles of copies of the
Times
along one wall. On the battered wooden desk in front of me stacks, or drifts, of magazines and opened mail, some of which had found a less crowded resting place on the floor. A threadbare green couch was littered with the daily newspapers, and pigeonholes on the wall behind the desk were overflowing with envelopes and flyers. The room was empty, and the phone was still ringing.

As I stood uncertainly, a girl with a large halo of frizzy red hair burst into the room, screamed
“Screw
that phone!” grabbed the receiver, surveyed me, and said, crisply,
“Times.”

She held up a finger to indicate she’d be through in a minute. Her exuberant hair, big blue eyes, and freckles cried out for an oversized polka-dot bow tie and a bright yellow derby, but instead she wore the top to a set of long underwear, bib overalls, and hiking boots. “Yeah, we plan to keep publishing. Andrew Baffrey’s taking over as editor,” she said, sitting down at the desk and resting one leg on the piles of mail, knocking a few more pieces to the ground.