The McCone Files Read online

  THE

  McCONE FILES

  By

  Marcia Muller

  Copyright © 1993 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust

  Ebook copyright 2011 by AudioGO. All rights reserved.

  ISBN 978-1-60998-621-6

  42 Whitecap Drive

  North Kingstown, RI 02852

  Visit us online at www.audiogo.com

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  The Last Open File

  Merrill-Go-Round

  Wild Mustard

  The Broken Men

  Deceptions

  Cache and Carry

  Deadly Fantasies

  All the Lonely People

  The Place That Time Forgot

  Somewhere in the City

  Final Resting Place

  Silent Night

  Benny’s Space

  The Lost Coast

  File Closed

  INTRODUCTION

  Sharon McCone came into existence in 1971, when I was hiding out in what was to become her studio apartment on Guerrero Street in San Francisco’s Mission district. Hiding out for a variety of reasons.

  The city that had entranced me in the sixties was changing: the peace-and-love motif of the nearby Haight-Ashbury had given way to hard drugs-and-crime; people who used to attend free concerts in the park were heading for the singles bars; although many of us still wanted to save the whales and secure equal rights for women, gays, and minorities, we sensed something bad on the horizon. We did, after all, have Richard Nixon running for president.

  In addition to the general societal malaise, I was contending with a failed journalistic career, a failing long-distance marriage and the fact that I was such a terrible typist that the companies where I hired on as a temp never asked me back. Perhaps not contending is better phrasing; all I did was read mysteries for escape. Somehow novels about crime and criminals perfectly complemented my situation.

  Every week I’d hop on the bus and travel to the main branch of the public library, where I’d check out as many mysteries as I could carry. Increasingly I found myself gravitating to those by the practitioners of the hardboiled school: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald, among others. More often than not the protagonists were private investigators: male, tough, disaffected loners. I would read the books and dream of going off into the night, free and unafraid, to right wrongs. I wanted to live them. Or did I want to write them?

  When I found myself staring at the space on the library shelf where “Muller” would fit and dreaming of how my name would look in the company of my favorite crime writers, I knew the answer to that question.

  I’d wanted to be a writer since I was old enough to read; now my future calling was decided. But through whose eyes would I live my stories? A private investigator’s, yes. But not a man’s; I didn’t know anything about being a man. A San Franciscan’s for sure; it was the city I loved best. And she would have to be braver and think more quickly on her feet than her creator. She also needs a name.

  Sharon McCone is first-named for one of my college roommates, Sharon Delano; she is last-named for a former head of the CIA, the late John McCone. My roommate was aware of the borrowing; John McCone was not until his niece wrote to ask why I’d used her family name and I admitted to my small private joke. Fortunately, Mr. McCone was amused. Sharon’s physical appearance—a throwback to her Shoshone great-grandmother—mirrors that of a woman with whom I worked briefly at Sunset magazine. Her background is that of a friend in San Diego, with numerous events purloined from the life of yet another friend. Her personality, conviction, actions, and reactions are her own.

  Of course, this individual did not spring to life fully formed. I struggled for years to bring her persona and circumstances into focus. Most of the private investigators I’d been reading about operated alone, frequently out of sleazy offices, and had very little personal life. I wanted McCone to be independent, yet exist within a world peopled by supporting characters. What sort of milieu would provide that framework?

  All Souls Legal Cooperative was born out of a conference on women and the law held at University of California at Berkeley in the spring of 1972. While I was covering it as a final journalistic foray, I met a number of dedicated, energetic, and idealistic members of a southern California organization called Bar Sinisters. They were my introduction to the poverty law movement and provided McCone with what was to become base for the next twenty-two years. Once I created the co-op, I was able to begin writing.

  I wrote. Hundreds of pages. Reams of paper. Truly awful stuff. The first McCone manuscript is so bad I keep it under lock and key. However, in writing the opening story of this collection, “The Last Open File,” I was forced to go back and read parts of the manuscript in order to get the flavor of All Souls as I described it at the very beginning. It was a truly humbling experience in all respects save one: Sharon’s voice was the same as it is today. Except for one detail—she had been a nurse before going to college: I suppose I presumed this would better enable her to deal with finding corpses—she was the same character who appeared in 1977 in Edwin of the Iron Shoes.

  Over the seventeen years since that slim first novel, very little about McCone except her voice has remained the same, and the stories in this collection trace her development. In the “The Last Open File,” a prequel written especially for this volume, she is what a critic once referred to as “something of a cheerleader,” rescued from destitution by her old friend Hank Zahn, who lures her into All Souls’ employ with the promise of an intriguing case. And even her creator has to admit that in “Merrill-Go-Round”—written in 1978, but not improved enough for publication until 1981 (and further revised for this volume)—she is a little slow to pick up on the obvious clues. But by the time she investigates in “Wild Mustard,” “The Broken Men,” and “Deceptions,” she is seeing a darker side to the world: the tragic consequences of human beings’ foolish, stupid, or downright evil actions.

  As she confronts these consequences, both in her short stories and her novels, McCone develops a cynical side. She is less willing to take people or situations at face value, and she finds her ideals are eroding. Not that they disappear; if anything, they arise inconveniently to complicate her life—as in “Final Resting Place,” when against her better judgment she takes on an investigation for an old college friend, or “Deadly Fantasies,” when she sets out to avenge a client she has let down. In “Somewhere in the City,” set during the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, she is so profoundly affected that she risks her life to save a man she’s never laid eyes on. Sharon and I both worked off a great deal of what psychologists term “survivor’s guilt” with that tale.

  In the 1991 novel Where Echoes Live, McCone reaches a major emotional turning point, recognizing and beginning to deal with both her attraction to danger and her own potential for the rage and violence she deplores in others. While she accepts both as perfectly natural impulses, she knows she will be engaged in a lifetime struggle to control them. The effects of this self-knowledge are implied in the later stories, “Benny’s Space” and “The Lost Coast.”

  The development of All Souls Legal Cooperative parallels that of McCone. A self-sacrificing group of liberals fueled by the ideals of the sixties gradually evolves into the largest legal-services plan in northern California, complete with an 800-number advice hotline. They’re soon buying real estate, restructuring the organization and—eventually—squabbling among themselves. Even as dedicated a leftist as Hank Zahn admits that he likes good Scotch, designer suits, and being called in to consult with the city’s deputy mayors. In fictional life, as in real life, change is inevitable, but finally McCone and her creator began to wonder if the co-op was a
good place to work.

  The answer was obvious, and with the 1994 publication of Till the Butchers Cut Him Down, McCone is on her own. She still can’t cut the apron string to All Souls, however, and maintains her offices there. In A Wild and Lonely Place, to be published in August of 1995, she is still tenuously tied to the past, but imagine my surprise when I heard her begin to grumble about the co-op. It’s beginning to pale for her, she tells me. She doesn’t like to have her clients come there, and she’s sick of listening to the staff bicker. As she has so many times over the twenty-two years we’ve been together, McCone is dictating what direction the series will go.

  Hence the final story in this collection, “File Closed,” written as a companion to “The Last Open File.” It is my way of rounding out McCone’s tenure at All Souls, as well as paving the way for her future. If I’ve indulged in sentimentality there…well, leave-takings are sentimental occasions. But they also imply new beginnings, and who knows what awaits Sharon?

  Certainly not her creator. As usual, I’ll just have to wait till she tells me.

  Marcia Muller

  Petaluma, California

  December 1994

  THE LAST OPEN FILE

  THE BIG Victorian slumped between its neighbors on a steeply sloping side-street in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights district: tall, shabby, and strangely welcoming in spite of its sagging roofline and blistered chocolate paint. I got out of my battered red MG and studied the house for a moment, then cut across the weedy triangular park that bisected Coso Street and climbed the front steps. A line of pigeons roosted on the peak above the door; I glanced warily at them before slipping under and obeying a hand-lettered sign that told me to “Walk Right In!”

  It seemed an unnecessary risk to leave one’s door open in the low-rent area, but when I entered I came face-to-face with a man sitting at a desk. He had fine features and a goatee, and was dressed in the flannel-shirt-and-Levi’s uniform of the predominately gay Castro district; although his dark eyes were mild and friendly, he was scrutinizing me very carefully. I presented my business card—one of the thousand I’d had printed on credit at my friend Daphne’s and Charlie’s shop—and his expression became less guarded. “You’re Sharon McCone, Hank’s detective friend!” he exclaimed.

  I nodded, although I didn’t feel much like a detective any more. For the past few years I’d worked under the license of one of the city’s large investigative firms; the day I’d received my own ticket from the State Department of Consumer Affairs, my boss had fired me for insubordination. At first I’d seen it as an opportunity to strike out on my own, but operating out of my studio apartment on Guerrero Street was far from an ideal situation; jobs were few, I was about to run out of cards, and my rent was due next Thursday. Yesterday I’d run into Hank Zahn, a former housemate from my college days at U. C. Berkeley. He’d asked me to stop by his law firm for a talk.

  I’d hoped the talk would be about a job, but from the looks of this place I doubted it.

  The man at the desk seemed to be waiting for more of a response. Inanely I said, “Yes,” to reinforce the nod.

  He got up and stuck out his hand “Ted Smalley—secretary, janitor, and—occasionally—court jester. Welcome to All Souls Legal Cooperative.”

  I clasped his slender fingers, liking his smile.

  “Hank’s in conference with a client right now,” Ted went on. “Why don’t you make yourself comfortable in the parlor.” He motioned to his right, at a big blue room with a fireplace and a butt-sprung maroon sofa and chair. “I’ll tell him you’re here.”

  I went in there, noting an old-fashioned upright piano and a profusion of books and games on the coffee table. A tall schefflera grew in the window bay; its pot was a pink toilet. I sat on the couch and immediately a coil of spring prodded my rump. Moving over, I glared at where it pushed through the upholstery.

  Make myself comfortable, indeed!

  Ted Smalley had disappeared down the long central hall off the foyer. I looked around some more, wondering what the hell Hank was doing in such a place.

  Hank Zahn was a Stanford grad and had been at the top of his law school class at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall. When I’d last seen him he was packing his belongings prior to turning over his room in the brown-shingled house we’d shared on Durant Street to yet another on an ongoing chain of tenants that stretched back into the early sixties and for all I knew continued unbroken to this very day. At the time he was being courted by several prestigious law firms, and he’d joked that the salaries and benefits they offered were enough to make him sell out to the establishment. But Hank was a self-styled leftist and social reformer, a Vietnam vet weaned from the military on Berkeley’s radical politics; selling out wasn’t within his realm of possibility. I could envision him as a public defender or an ACLU lawyer or a loner in private practice, but what was this cooperative business?

  As I waited in the parlor, though, I had to admit the place had the same feel as the house we’d shared in Berkeley; laid-back and homey, brimming with companionship, humming with energy and purpose. Several people came and went, nodding pleasantly to me but appearing focused and intense. I’d come away from the Berkeley house craving solitude as strongly as when I’d left my parents’ rambling, sibling-crowded place in San Diego. Not so with Hank, apparently.

  Voices in the hallway now. Hank’s and Ted Smalley’s. Hank hurried into the parlor, holding out his hands to me. A tall, lean man, so loose-jointed that his limbs seemed linked by paperclips, he had a wiry Brillo pad of brown hair and thick horn-rimmed glasses that magnified the intelligence in his eyes; in the type of cords and sweaters that he’d always favored he looked more the college teaching assistant than the attorney. He clasped my hands, pulled me to my feet and hugged me. “I see you’ve already done battle with the couch,” he said, gesturing at the protruding spring.

  “Where did you get that thing—the city dump?”

  “Actually, somebody left it and the matching chair and hassock on the sidewalk on Sixteenth Street. I recognized a bargain and recycled them.”

  “And the piano?”

  “Ted’s find. Garage sale. The same with the schefflera.”

  “Well, you guys are nothing if not resourceful. You want to tell me about this place?”

  “In a minute.” He steered me to the hallway. “Wait till you see the kitchen.”

  It was at the rear of the house: a huge room equipped with ancient appliances and glass-fronted cupboards; dishes cluttered the drainboard of the sink, a stick of butter melted on its wrapper on the counter, and a long red phone cord snaked across the floor and disappeared under a round oak table by a window that gave a panoramic view of downtown. A book titled White Trash Cooking lay broken-spined on a chair. Hank motioned for me to sit, fetched coffee, and pulled up a chair opposite me.

  “Great, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “You’re probably wondering what’s going on here.”

  I nodded.

  “All Souls Law Cooperative works like a medical plan. People who can’t afford the bloated fees many of my colleagues charge buy a membership, its cost based on a scale according to their incomes. The membership gives them access to consul and legal services all the way from small claims to the U.S. Supreme Court. Legal services plans’re the coming thing, an outgrowth of the poverty law movement.”

  “How many people’re involved?”

  “Seventeen, right now.”

  “You making any money?”

  “Does it look like we are? No. But we sure are having fun, Most of us live on the premises—offices double as sleeping quarters, and there’re some bedrooms on the second floor—and that offsets the paltry salaries. We pool expenses, barter services such as cooking and taking out the trash. There’re parties and potlucks and poker games. Right now a Monopoly tournament’s the big thing.”

  “Just like on Durant.”

  “Uh-huh. You remember Anne-Marie Altman?”

  �
��Of course.” She’d been an off-and-on resident at Durant, and a classmate of Hank’s.

  “Well, she’s our tax attorney, and one of the people who helped me found the co-op.”

  “Why, Hank?”

  “Why a co-op? Because it’s the most concrete way I can make a difference in a world that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the little people. I learned at Berkeley that bombs and bricks aren’t going to do a damned thing for society; maybe practicing law the way it was meant to be practiced will.”

  He looked idealistic and earnest and—in spite of the years he had on me—very young. I said, “I hope so, Hank.”

  He must have sensed my doubt and felt a twinge of his own, because for a moment his gaze muddied. Then he said briskly, “So, how’s business?”

  I made a rueful face, glancing down at my ratty sweater and faded jeans. The heels on my leather boots were worn down, and the last time it rained, water leaked through the right sole. “Bad,” I admitted.

  “Thinking of looking for permanent employment?”

  “With my references?” I snorted. “ ‘Doesn’t take direction well, nonresponsive to authority figures, inflexible and overly independent. Can be pushy, severe, and dominant.’ That was my last review before the agency canned me. Forget it.”

  “Jesus, that could describe any one of us at All Souls.”

  “Maybe it’s a generational flaw.”

  “Maybe, but it’s us. You want a job here?”

  “Do I want…what?”

  “We’re looking for a staff investigator.”

  “Since when?”

  He grinned. “Since yesterday when I ran into you in front of City Hall and started thinking about all the nonlegal work we’ve been heaping on our paralegals.”

  “Such as?”

  “Nothing all that exciting, I’m afraid. Filing documents; tracking down witnesses; interviewing same; locating people and serving subpoenas. Pretty dull work, when you get right down to it, but the after-hours company is good. We’re all easygoing; we’d leave you alone to do our work in your own way.”