No One You Know (11 page)

Sixteen

A
S
I
DROVE OUT OF TOWN TOWARD
S
OUTH
City, San Francisco’s picturesque skyline gave way to the flat, industrial landscape of the Peninsula. I’d taken a couple of days off work after the Nicaragua trip, and I was glad to be returning to Golden Gate Coffee. From a quarter mile away, I could smell the rich caramel scent of roasting coffee. I pulled around to the back of the building. It was a warm day, the sun glinting off the flat, shining bay.

Inside, Dora was on the phone with the broker, buying coffee on the futures market. Soon, giant sacks of the stuff would be loaded onto a ship in Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee, and begin their journey west. It would be several weeks before they arrived at the port of Oakland. Before the coffee was unloaded, samples would be brought back to the office, where Mike and I would roast and cup them.

“Wait until the Yirgacheffe hits $114,” Dora said into the phone. She covered the mouthpiece with her hand and greeted me. “Hi, stranger.”

I’d visited the coffee trading floor only once, in the summer of 2001, when the New York coffee exchange, the largest coffee auction in the Western Hemisphere, was still housed in the World Trade Center. A few months later, the obliterated trading pits were at the bottom of tons of rubble, and the coffee traders had relocated to dismal, low-ceilinged rooms across the East River. Just days after 9/11, the new, makeshift trading floor was doing a robust business; no matter what happened in the world, people still wanted their coffee.

In the cupping room just beyond the office, several trays were laid out with samples waiting to be roasted and cupped. I plunged my hand into the mound of Tanzanian peaberry beans and breathed in the musty smell. Next to the peaberry was an Ethiopian Harrar. I’d also brought some beans from Nicaragua, which I poured into trays and labeled for later. I already knew we’d be ordering a large shipment of Jesus’s coffee, but Mike liked to taste every sample himself. He was a perfectionist. His great-grandfather Milos had started the business during the Gold Rush, and it was Milos’s likeness that still graced the packages of coffee bearing the Stekopolous family name.

I fed the peaberry into one of three small metal drums on the sample roaster, a Jabez Burns that had been passed down through generations. In the second drum, I placed the Ethiopian Harrar. I lit the gas burner and waited. After a few minutes, the beans began to sizzle and pop. The room filled with a rich floral scent. I took the peaberry beans out first, scooping them into the perforated metal cooling tray. For the Harrar, I wanted a slightly darker roast, so I waited for the second round of popping to begin and end. When the beans were roasted to my satisfaction, the papery chaff removed, I checked the beans for color and ground them coarsely before scooping a bit of coffee into each of the clear glass cups.

“Good to have you back,” Mike said, emerging from his office.

“Good to be back.”

We began tasting. Between slurps, Mike caught me up on office gossip. During my absence, Jennifer Wilson, one of the sales reps, had announced that she was pregnant, and Gabrielle, the daughter of the owner of a rival company, had started dating one of our warehouse guys. Debbie Dybsky from accounting was retiring and moving to Muir Beach. Hearing news of my co-workers made me feel at home. Aside from my mother, they were the people I was closest to in the world.

There was a large brass spittoon beside each stool, but neither of us used them. Instead we swallowed the coffee, sipping water between tastes. I had inherited Mike’s down-to-earth tasting style, which got the job done without all the Sturm und Drang.

“Some guys make it all about the performance,” Mike had told me in the beginning. “For me, it’s about the coffee. That’s why I like you. You can smell an exceptional bean from a mile away.”

Early on, I’d learned to appreciate Mike’s mentorship, and I would always be grateful to him for giving me a chance. When I started in the business in the late nineties, there were still men who wouldn’t deign to sit at a cupping table with a woman. Like the kitchens of fancy restaurants, the bowels of mining shafts, and the most prestigious math departments, the coffee industry was a man’s world. Odd, considering that, from the beginning of coffee’s popularity in the U.S., it had been primarily women who purchased the stuff and brought it to the table.

For my thirty-fourth birthday, Henry had given me a rare copy of William Harrison Ukers’s 1922 book
All About Coffee,
the Bible of the coffee industry. Weighing in at eight hundred pages, it was filled with fine print and elaborate illustrations. One of my favorites was an 1872 Arbuckle Brothers advertisement, picturing a perplexed-looking woman in an apron standing over a smoking stove, complaining, “Oh, I have burnt my coffee again.” Another ad, titled “A Mistake Many Women Make,” urges housewives to buy Arbuckle Brothers pre-roasted coffee instead of roasting their own, claiming falsely that “every time you roast four pounds of coffee you lose a whole pound.” The ad wasn’t just offensive; it was inaccurate. Like any narrative, the story of coffee was peppered with half-truths. It took a discerning eye to separate fact from fiction.

Even after the relationship with Henry ended,
All About Coffee
retained a prime position on the buffet table in my dining room. Like the silver lighter I bought for him in Guatemala on the day he left, the book served as a reminder of our history together. So did Golden Gate Coffee. Everyone there knew him. His blue eyes still gazed out from the huge staff photograph that hung in the lobby. In the picture we stood side by side, his arm around my shoulders, mine around his waist. Every now and then, when I stayed late at the office after everyone else had left, I’d find myself standing in front of the photograph, staring, trying to figure out what exactly had gone wrong.

Seventeen

T
HE
S
AN
F
RANCISCO
L
ADIES’
B
UREAU LUNCHEON
was in the restaurant of a downtown hotel. The round tables were set with white plates and pink napkins. A stack of
Blood in the Valley
formed the centerpiece of each table. I took a seat near the back.

On my right was an attractive woman in her late forties who turned to me and said, “And who might you be?”

“Ellie.”

“Welcome,” she said, offering me her hand. “I’m Maggie. This is Dwight, Barbara, Stella, and my daughter Claire.”

“I’m going to interview him for the paper,” Claire said. She was petite, blonde, and blue-eyed, with the kind of skin that’s featured in Cover Girl commercials.

“Which paper?”

“Mercy High.”

I suddenly felt very old. After Lila died, my father had retreated into himself, to such an extent that my mother turned to me for companionship. The result was that, for quite some time, I had been her frequent companion at luncheons, law firm parties, and wine tastings. We spent so much time together that I felt I had more social interaction with people my mom’s age than my own. Her friends seemed to welcome my presence, and always took a sincere interest in what I was studying, whom I was seeing. I remembered so clearly how it felt to be Claire’s age—grateful for the attention of my mother’s friends but also smugly proud of my youth. It was impossible, at that age, not to be aware of the power that came with being young. Claire, it was clear, possessed that same pride and confidence. When the waiter came to fill our water glasses, he couldn’t stop looking at her, and she accepted the attention as if it was her due.

Lila, on the other hand, never possessed the arrogance of youth. Maybe that had something to do with the fact that, in math years, she was already getting on. “If I’m going to make my mark, I don’t have much time,” she told me during her final year at Berkeley. “Niels Henrik Abel was only nineteen when he proved that there is no finite formula for the solution of the general fifth-degree equation. Gauss published
Disquisitiones Arithmeticae
at twenty-four. Galois discovered the connection between group theory and polynomial equations before dying in a gunfight at the age of twenty. It’s like Hardy said, ‘Mathematics is a young man’s game.’ Or, in my case, young woman’s.”

Stella pulled two cell phones and a beeper out of her purse and lined them up above her plate, as if some urgent matter might whisk her away at any moment. She was dressed in an ugly but expensive-looking green suit. “I’ve read every one of Andrew Thorpe’s books, even
Second Time’s a Charm,
” she said.

“This was my first,” said Claire. “I loved it. After I finished this I borrowed
Runner Up, Runner Down
from Mom, and now I’m working my way back.”

“Just wait until you read
Murder by the Bay,
” said Barbara. “That was his best by far.”

“I met the mother once,” Dwight said. There was a visible shift of attention at the table; all heads turned toward him. “At a fundraiser for the San Francisco Ballet. She was the nicest lady you could hope to meet. We swapped tips on growing geraniums.”

I doubted very much that my mother had ever been at a San Francisco Ballet fund-raiser. I knew for a fact that she’d never taken an interest in geraniums. He must have remembered her green thumb from Thorpe’s book. Thorpe had taken two pages to describe the intricate layout of my mother’s garden, which she showed him once when I invited him to dinner at our house. Now, I wondered—did Dwight really think he had met her, or was he just pretending he had in order to make himself appear more interesting? One thing I’d discovered over the years is that tragedy is like a major earthquake or an act of terrorism: no one wants to experience it firsthand, but everyone wants to be able to place themselves close to the scene of the disaster.

Maggie tapped me on the forearm. “Have you read it?”

“Yes, but it was a long time ago.”

“Well? What did you think?”

I took a sip of my water. A bit of lemon pulp stuck in my teeth. “It was well-written.” I couldn’t bring myself, at that moment, among those people, to say that the whole book was a betrayal of my family on a monumental scale.

“Personally,” Maggie said, “I don’t think Thorpe has yet to write another book to even compare to his first.” She turned to Claire. “It’s a classic, you know. Write
that
in your school paper.”

“But there are plenty of true crime books out there,” I said. “What was it about
Murder by the Bay
that left such an impression?”

It was a question I’d never asked anyone before. After I read the book the first time, I wanted to forget it existed. Even several years after the fact, a perfectly good day could be ruined by spotting someone with it on the bus, or coming across a used copy in a bookstore. Every time I caught a glimpse of it, my memories of the day when my parents pulled out of the driveway in their gray Volvo, headed to the morgue in Guerneville, came flooding back.

“When I read it,” Stella said, “I felt like I was there in the woods with that poor girl where her body was dumped. My own daughter was ten years old at the time, and it chilled me to the bone. For the longest time I couldn’t let her out of the house without worrying that something terrible was going to happen.”

“It wasn’t just that,” Maggie said. “That’s part of it, of course—the fear that it could happen to someone you love. But for me, more than that it was the fact that I felt like I knew Lila. What a sweet, smart girl she was, with such amazing promise. The kind of daughter any parent would be proud to have. You invest everything in your child—time and money, of course, but also your emotions, and your hope. So much goes into a life, so much goes into nurturing a child. As a mother, it’s just absolutely horrifying to think that one person can put an end to all of that.”

“At least it wasn’t a random act of violence,” Stella said. “Nothing’s more terrifying than the idea of being attacked by someone you don’t even know.”

Nods all around. I believed that Stella had hit on a key aspect of the book’s success. The ultimate effect of naming Peter McConnell as the killer was to reassure readers that it couldn’t happen to
them.
Thorpe’s version of the story gave the impression that violence wasn’t random, it wasn’t something that happened to good, ordinary people going about their good, ordinary lives.
In the vast majority of cases,
he wrote in the prologue,
murder victims know their killers.

There was a slight commotion in the room, and I turned to see Andrew Thorpe walking through the door.

Thorpe had lost weight. Back when I knew him, he wasn’t over-weight, but he’d always had a slightly dumpy look, a result of his distaste for the outdoors and his affinity for pasta and beer. Now he was trim and tan, his head entirely shaved. He wore black pinstripe pants, a snug black Oxford, and side-zip boots. The overall effect was a kind of Bruce Willis flair, but he wore the style self-consciously, as if someone else had chosen his clothes. At fifty, he appeared to be in better health than he was when I knew him at thirty.

A woman in a yellow pantsuit led him to a pedestal and introduced him.

“It’s a real pleasure to be here with you,” Thorpe began, smiling broadly. “You work on a book in solitude for such a long time, when you finally get out into the world to talk about it, it feels like you’ve been released from prison.” The Southern accent which had been just a faint holdover when I knew Thorpe was much stronger now, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he was playing it up for the crowd.

“Speaking of prison,” he continued, “I’ve just returned from Pelican Bay State penitentiary, where I went to see Johnny Grimes, who, you might recall, is serving twenty to life in a second-degree murder charge for the deaths of Stacy Everett and Greg Simmons.”

There were nods and murmurs. The waitstaff came around with the salads, iceberg wedges with blue cheese dressing. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had iceberg lettuce in a restaurant. In a hipper establishment, I would have thought the iceberg wedge was a new fad, but in this case I knew it had probably been on the menu for decades. Our waiter glanced down Claire’s shirt when he set her salad in front of her; she leaned forward to give him a better look.

Thorpe spent a few minutes talking about how he’d become interested in the Silicon Valley murders. He mentioned his friendship with families of the victims, and I wondered what their take on the relationship would be. Had they let Thorpe into their lives? Had he eaten dinner in their homes as he did in ours? Had they shown him the family photo albums, played him home movies of their kids in happier times? I imagined that, if they’d had a say in the matter, they would have chosen not to have a book written at all.

The waiters cleared away the salad plates and brought out the main course, grilled chicken with rice, a side of broccoli florets. Thorpe had finished his preamble now and began reading. I wondered if anyone else found it strange to be gnawing on chicken and broccoli while Thorpe eagerly read a particularly bloody scene from his book. It was the first chapter, and like the book about Lila, it opened with a description of the bodies as they had been found in the aftermath of the crime. It was his thing, what he was known for—what one reviewer had called his “unflinching portrayal of the crime scene.”

While he was reading, Thorpe looked up from the book, made eye contact with the audience. I waited for him to see me. Would I throw him off balance? Would he fumble his sentence, lose his place on the page? But then I realized he wasn’t actually making eye contact with anyone. Instead, as he glanced around the room, he kept his gaze just slightly above eye level, so as to create the appearance of interacting with the crowd without actually doing so. And I remembered that he used to do the same thing during class. He confessed this to me one afternoon over ice cream at Mitchell’s. “If I look in the students’ eyes, I get nervous,” he said, “so instead I just pretend.”

Dessert came. Just as the lunching ladies tucked into their flourless chocolate cake, Thorpe said, “Any questions?”

A frail-looking woman at the table next to mine raised her hand, and Thorpe acknowledged her with a nod. “What was the most difficult thing about writing this book?” she asked.

“Just untangling the web,” Thorpe said. “When you write a novel, you have complete power over the events and the characters, complete control of the story. You start with a blank canvas. But with nonfiction, obviously, you’re at the mercy of the facts. I interviewed dozens of people for this book. Everyone had his or her own version of the story, and every version was different.”

Someone asked how his wife felt about
Second Time’s a Charm.
“She hated it,” he said. “Then she saw the first royalty check.”

People laughed. Forks clinked. The waiters came around with coffee.

“How do you find stories to write about?”

“I don’t really find stories,” Thorpe said. “The stories find me. In this case, for example, I had a friend who was working at Yahoo at the time of the murders. We were golfing together one day, and he began to tell me about how the organization had been turned upside down by the events. He talked about how fearful people had become, about the culture of mistrust that arose on the Yahoo campus after it happened. To me, that was a story begging to be told. I wasn’t interested in the murders so much as I was interested in their aftermath, and I was less intrigued by the victims than I was by the people who were left behind, the way those relationships shifted.”

Watching Thorpe work the room, I tried to recall what it was about him that made me willing to tell him such personal details, things I had revealed to no one else. Now, even more so than before, his persuasiveness was in full form, as if he’d spent the last twenty years perfecting it. He’d passed the Sundays of his childhood in a Southern Baptist church in Tuscaloosa, and I couldn’t deny that he had something of the evangelist’s flair about him—a stagy, folksy presence that made everyone lean slightly forward in their seats.

There were still hands in the air when Thorpe smiled and said, “Well, if there are no more questions…” and stepped away from the pedestal.

The woman in the yellow pantsuit instructed everyone to form a line in front of the signing table.

Thorpe signed quickly, head down, exchanging a couple of words with each person before sliding the book back across the table with a smile. As the line inched forward, I felt my stomach knotting up. So many times over the years, I had wanted to confront him, but something had always stopped me; for one thing, I didn’t know that I could face him. More important, a confrontation seemed futile. The book was written, the damage done. What possible good could it do—for me or my parents, or for Lila—to open up the wound? But now, everything had changed. If the book was made of lies, as McConnell alleged, then Thorpe’s betrayal was even greater. I needed to hear from Thorpe himself how much truth was in those pages.