There's Nothing to Be Afraid Of (12 page)

He was right—and that was even more scary than the possible demise of All Souls. “Hank,” I said, “I still don’t see how people like Gilbert can just walk in here and try to take control.”

“They’re not just walking in, Shar. They’re partners.”

“But you and Anne-Marie and the others—you’ve been here longer. Don’t you have seniority?”

“No. And I suppose that’s my fault. It’s ironic, too—Gilbert and his supporters are accusing me of living back in the sixties, when actually it was my attempt to bring All Souls into the eighties that put power in their hands in the first place.”

“I don’t understand.”

“A few years ago I decided we needed to offer fuller services to our clients. Oh, we had a few specialists, like Anne-Marie on tax law, but basically we didn’t have the expertise our clients needed. So I set out to recruit people with those specialties—Gilbert on contract law, for instance. And I quickly found out that my colleagues are more money-oriented now than they were when we graduated. I couldn’t afford more established professionals, so I had to recruit them from law schools. And even with new graduates, I had to offer more than a low salary, a room on the second floor, and a lot of job satisfaction. What I ended up offering was full partnerships.”

“You mean people like Gilbert have as much say in what happens around here as
you
do?”

“That’s it.”

Once again, he’d stunned me. And suddenly I had a horrible suspicion. “Hank,” I said, “if Gilbert’s faction has its way, what do they intend to do about my job?”

He looked uncomfortable.

“Hank!”

“They want to contract with an outside agency. They claim we don’t have enough work to support an on-staff investigator.”

I thought of the ten-and twelve-hour days I routinely put in. I thought of the witnesses I interviewed, the court cases I testified in, the documents I delivered or filed. I thought of the cases I’d solved that had put All Souls’ name on the front page of the newspapers and brought new clients to our door.

“I know,” Hank said gently.

“You know! Is that all you can say—you
know?”

There was a knock at the door, then it burst open so hard it banged into the wall. Gilbert Thayer—the devil we’d been speaking of—stood there, his little mustached twitching indignantly. “Sharon,” he said, “you’ve parked so I can’t get out of the driveway!”

So that was who owned the white Volvo. “I’ll be with you in a minute, Gilbert,” I said, reaching for my keys and turning back to Hank.

Gilbert remained standing there, breathing wheezily. I glanced back. “I said I’ll be right with you.”

“Sharon,” he said, “I left you a note yesterday about using the driveway.”

“I’m not in the driveway, Gilbert. I’m in the street.”

Damned if the corners of Hank’s mouth didn’t quirk up.

“Nonetheless,” Gilbert said stuffily, “the driveway is not for your convenience.”

It was the same phrase he had used in his note. The driveway, according to Gilbert, was for the
convenience of the attorneys only
. I began to smile, wickedly.

Hank looked puzzled.

“Gilbert,” I said, “where do you live?”

“At Potrero Towers. You know that.” The Towers was a luxury condominium complex, where, as Gilbert was fond of telling anyone who would listen, his father had bought him a unit.

“I see. And whose convenience is the driveway for?”

Now Hank began to smile, with a wickedness that matched my own.

Gilbert, however, was so caught up in his self-righteous anger that he didn’t realize his error. “Sharon, I need to get out of here. Now, will you move your car?”

“According to your note to me yesterday, the driveway is for the convenience of the attorneys—bit it’s really for the residents. I believe that’s written into the house rules. It’s never been enforced, because people realize parking is tight, and they try to get along and make one another’s lives easier.”

“Still, it is a rule—”

“Gilbert,
you’re
in violation of it, then. You’re not a resident.”

There was a long silence behind me. When I looked over my shoulder at him, his bunny-rabbit face was absolutely still.

“You’re not more a resident here than I am, Gilbert,” I said. “Since you do not choose to live here, the driveway is not for your convenience either.”

An ugly red tinge began to spread over his face. His nose and mustache twitched furiously. I wished I had a carrot to feed him.

Finally he said, “You. . . you . . .you move your car!”

“Sorry, Gilbert.” I turned to Hank. Hank had one hand pressed against his forehead and was staring at the pile of papers in front of him. His shoulders were shaking.

“I’ll have it towed!” Gilbert said. “I will, I will have it towed, you’re blocking a driveway, it’s illegal. I’ll have it towed.”

Suddenly Hank snorted. I stared at him in amazement. He snorted again.

Sometimes, in my moments of social duress, when I know I should control my mirth but can’t, I let forth with embarrassing sounds that resemble a pig rooting in its trough. I had often caused Hank discomfort by doing so, but now it appeared he finally understood the impulse.

“Move that car!” Gilbert shouted. “You move that car right now!”

“Sorry, Gilbert.”

“The police, I’ll call 911!”

“The number to call to have a car towed is 553-1631, Gilbert.”

The door slammed as Gilbert departed.

It took a moment for Hank to get himself under control. When he finally did, he said, “Aren’t you worried about your car?”

“Nope. It’s nearly four o’clock, the time they start clearing the tow-away zones. It will take them at least an hour to even get a cop out here.”

Hank took off his glasses and wiped tears of laughter from the corners of his eyes. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “the guy really puts you in a fighting mood, doesn’t he?”

“Yes. You?”

“Yes.” He grinned across the desk at me, and once more I felt the camaraderie we’d always shared—employer and employee but, more important, friend and friend. The way we’d been for years; the way All Souls had been too.

Hank said, “I haven’t had a really good battle with anybody in quite a while. To tell you the truth, I’m kind of looking forward to the one that’s coming up.

CHAPTER TWELVE

There was no sign of Gilbert when I went down the hall toward my office, but Ted was at his desk, typing with a jauntiness I hadn’t seen him exhibit in months. He motioned to me and said, “Bugs Bunny put in a call to have your car towed.”

“I kind of thought he would.”

“When he stormed outside to wait for the cops, I canceled the tow order.”

“Thanks, Ted. I owe you a beer.”

“It was my pleasure.”

He went back to his typing and I went to my office and called my house to check on Barry, the contractor. He had been there, waiting to get in, when I’d returned home to change my clothes that morning. Now there was no answer. Perhaps, I told myself, he was too busy to pick up the phone. But I had to admit that didn’t sound like Barry. Next I called Carolyn Bui. She was still meeting with her Board of Directors, her secretary informed me. I hung up the receiver and slumped in my ratty old armchair, reflecting that I wasn’t the only one having difficulty at my place of work.

My place of work. I looked around the tiny cubicle, with its sharply slanting ceiling and pale yellow walls that no amount of decoration had been able to make attractive. This office was really a converted closet; my salary was dismally low; there were few fringe benefits. If Gilbert’s faction won out in the struggle for control of All Souls and my job ceased to exist, I could get a job with one of the big agencies in town. I had a certain reputation and—even though part of it said I was unorthodox and unresponsive to authority—I knew there were a couple of outfits where I could pretty much write my own ticket. What would I be losing, anyway? A closet for an office and a paycheck that never stretched far enough.

Wait a minute, an inner voice told me. For one thing, you’d be losing your freedom. There is—or at least there used to be—a warmth and companionship here, and they also leave you alone.

But, I reminded myself, there would be extra money for the house renovation. And paid vacation. Maybe even a dental plan. Or a pension.

What about a sense of purpose? the annoying voice asked. You feel like you’re doing something valuable here, something that counts.

Does it? I thought. Sometimes I wonder. That’s the trouble with getting older. You start entertaining basic doubts about how much you’re accomplishing. And things like pensions and dental plans begin to matter more than ideals.

Restlessly I got up and left the office, wandering down the hall to the living room at the back of the house. It was deserted, and I stood in front of the window, watching the play of wintry sunlight on the tangle of vegetation in the backyard. There was a brick-and-board bookcase under the window for the convenience of the clients who waited in that room for their appointments, as well as for the leisure reading of the residents. The books were well-worn, most of them donated by the attorneys, many looking like supplemental texts form long-forgotten college courses. I ran my fingers over them, aligning the spines an even inch from the edge of the shelf, and as I did so, I encountered a volume of Yeats’ poetry. Thinking of Jimmy Mulligan, I pulled it out and leafed through it until I found “All Souls Night.”

As Mary Zemanek had said, the poem was eerie, all about wine glasses brimming with muscatel and ghosts coming to drink at midnight. I could picture a room straight out of a horror film: draped in cobwebs, deep in shadow, where spirits of the long-dead came to commune. Shivering, I turned the pages and read Jimmy’s other favorite, “The Song of Wandering Aengus.” It wasn’t very cheerful either, but at least it didn’t give me gooseflesh. Yeats seemed to have had a gloomy preoccupation with death; a number of his stanzas that ended in italicized lines dwelled on it:
“She was more beautiful than thy first love, But now lies under boards” . . . “All things remain in God” . . . “And there the king is but as the beggar” . . . “What shall I do for pretty girls now my old bawd is dead?”

Dammit, what was I doing reading poetry when I had a murder to investigate? I shut the book, put it back on the shelf, and located the living room phone by following its twenty-five-foot cord down the hallway to where the instrument sat outside the restroom. Red push-button phones with long cords were an All Souls tradition—one that caused more confusion than convenience, owing to the residents’ practice of wandering while talking and then abandoning the phones wherever they were when they hung up.

I sat crosslegged on the hallway floor and punched in the number of the Sensuous Showcase Theatre. No, the woman told me, Mr. Knox had not returned before going home. And no, she still could not give me the phone number at the ranch.

I hung up and thought of Knox’s insistence that he was just a country boy at heart. He’s said, “By nightfall, I’m back home with my horse.” Home, on his ranch in Marin County. Nicasio, he’d said.

I was now four-thirty and the first wave of commuters would be creeping across the Golden Gate Bridge and up the Waldo Grade into Marin County. Buses would be whizzing along in the special lanes allotted for them on the southbound side of the freeway, but traffic would still be slowed to a crawl by the time I reached San Rafael and the exit I needed to take for Nicasio. I wanted to talk to Otis Knox, thought, and I could brood as well in traffic as in my office.

I was leery of going out to Knox’s ranch without leaving word of my whereabouts, so I scribbled a short note to Hank, telling him he should contact the Marin County Sheriff’s Department if I didn’t check in with him by nine that evening. After slipping it under his office door, I left the building, circumventing Gilbert, who was now in the law library, throwing a tantrum about police inefficiency.

The Nicasio Valley lies in the western part of Marin County, pocketed in the section between San Rafael and the sea. It is long and narrow, surrounded by lightly wooded hills and dotted with cattle and horse ranches. By the time I reached it, dusk had fallen, and the lights of ranch buildings shone faintly through thick stands of oak, madrone, and eucalyptus. Just outside the little village for which the valley is named, a knobby hill reared up, its rocky outcroppings and stunted trees casting eerie shadows in the fading light.

The village centered on a square, most of which was a softball diamond. Across the road to one side was a white country church with a red roof and steeple, and directly ahead of me was a group of frame buildings that housed the post office and a restaurant. The post office would be closed by now, but perhaps someone at the restaurant could tell me how to find Otis Knox’s ranch.

I was already stopped in the parking lot when I realize the place was deserted. There were no other cars, and the only light was the red beacon on the volunteer fire department up the road. The restaurant must either be closed for good or for the slow winter season when few people ventured out for drives in the hills of West Marin. I put the car in reverse, backed up and continued around the deserted square.

On its third side were a couple of houses, a realty office, an antique store, and an odd humped-backed building called the Druids’ Hall. All the businesses were dark and closed up. A few yards past them, the road curved sharply in front of a house with big trees and a white picket fence. As I braked and made the turn, I reflected that it would take a braver person than I to live there, what with the headlights of every car sweeping over my front windows and the imminent possibility of one veering out of control and ending up in my living room.

At the end of the curve, I found myself back at Nicasio Valley Road, where I’d come in. I paused there, then decided to ask questions at one of the houses on the other side of the square. After turning left, I drove along its perimeter once more, past the old church to the intersection near the post office. I was about to turn again when I spotted a pair of headlight beams coming around the corner from where the main road branched off again to the west. A mud-splattered white pick-up truck drove into the parking area in front of the post office, and a man got out carrying some letters.