There's Nothing to Be Afraid Of Read online

  “Yes, then. But also other times. For no reason, it stopped between floors. Once Mrs. Dinh, who is pregnant, was inside. We feared for the unborn child.”

  “Did anyone come out to inspect the elevator?”

  “No. The manager asked the owner to send someone, and he said he would. But no one came.

  I said to Carolyn, “What about this owner?”

  “That’s another story. I’ll fill you in later.”

  I paused. “Did anyone contact the police about all these things?”

  Mrs. Vang said, “There is a foot officer—”

  “Beat officer,” Carolyn corrected her.

  “Yes, beat officer. A Patrolman Sanders. I spoke with him and he came into the hotel and looked around. But he also saw nothing. He said he could do no more unless someone was hurt or if there was proof of what I told him about. He was very nice, but he could not help.”

  I looked down at the scribbling in my notebook, wondering how seriously the officer had taken Mrs. Vang’s complaint and if he’d filed a report on it. “Well,” I said, “what I’d like to do now is get a list of the disturbing events, by date.”

  Lan Vang set the baby in Jenny’s lap and rose. She went to a little table next to the couch and took a paper from its drawer. Handing it to me, she said, “We have written it all down.”

  I unfolded the paper and saw a chart, printed in a neat hand. It contained two columns, respectively labeled Date and Incident. The first entry was for November 17, and it read, “Jenny Vang frightened by howling in furnace room. Mrs. Zemanek goes down, says no one there.”

  “Who’s Mrs. Zemanek?” I asked.

  “The manager,” Carolyn said. “We’ll see her later.”

  “Okay.” I glanced over the list again, pleased at its detail. If only all my clients were so well prepared. “I think what I should do is study this list, check around, and then get together with all of you again when I have further questions. Would this evening be convenient?”

  Lan Vang said, “It will have to be very late. We must be at the restaurant until after eleven.”

  I thought of my evening’s plans. My boyfriend, Don Del Boccio, was coming to my house for dinner, but then he had a taping scheduled at the radio station where he was a disc jockey. I would be left to my own devices from about nine o’clock on. “That’s all right,” I said. “I’m used to late hours too.”

  “Thank you, Miss McCone.” Lan smiled for the first time, a shy and somewhat tremulous smile that made me determined to help her and the other residents if I could.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Carolyn and I said goodbye to the Vangs and walked silently toward the elevator. When their door had closed and we were out of earshot, I said, “How serious do you think this problem is?”

  “Serious enough that I’m willing to spend the Center’s money to have you investigate it. These are not fanciful people; they’ve experienced real danger in their lives, and they don’t imagine things. I think someone’s trying to frighten them for some reason, and I want to put a stop to it.”

  I nodded and looked up and down the hall, trying to get a sense of how the hotel was laid out. At the end where the Vangs’ apartment was, the Exit sign glowed over a door that presumably opened into the stairwell where the frightening shadows lurked. At the other end, ahead of us, a window opened onto an airshaft; through it I could see the grimy stone wall of the building next door. Four doors opened off the hallway on the side that fronted on Eddy Street, but only two on the wall opposite. The front apartments were probably one-bedrooms or studios, while those in the rear—one of which was the Vangs’—would be two-bedrooms. The elevator was in the center of the building, midway between the two rear apartments.

  Carolyn punched the elevator button and said, “I think you should meet the manager, Mrs. Zemanek, and then look the building over.”

  “Okay. But before we see her, tell me something about Mrs. Zemanek.”

  “There’s really not much to tell.” The elevator arrived, its door opening about three inches and stopping there. Carolyn sighed and flung it all the way open, then wrestled with the iron grille. “No wonder it gets stuck between floors.” She waved me into the cage, then said, “Anyway, about Mary Zemanek. She’s a lady of around seventy who supplements her Social Security with this job. I don’t think it pays much, but it does include a free apartment. Mrs. Zemanek seems to genuinely care for most of the tenants, and she doesn’t exhibit hostility toward the Vietnamese—which is something we’re up against all the time in these Tenderloin hotels—but she tends to side with the owner if there’s any sort of dispute.”

  The elevator bumped to a stop at the ground floor. “Have there been many?”

  “A fair number. Like I said, Mrs. Zemanek needs the job to supplement her Social Security payments, and she’s not about to make waves.”

  Carolyn led me from the elevator to a door next to the deserted reception desk. “Mrs. Zemanek’s apartment.” She knocked and seconds later it was opened by a small woman whose short white hair was arranged in tight snail-like curls. She looked at Carolyn, and then her pale blue eyes surveyed me from head to foot.

  “So you’re planning to go ahead with this foolishness,” she said in a low-pitched voice that was gravelly with age.

  “If you mean that I’m going to get to the bottom of what’s been happening here, yes.” There was an edge to Carolyn’s words; I gathered she’d had trouble with the manager before.

  “The owner won’t like somebody snooping around on his property.”

  “The owner will like it less if something really bad happens here.”

  The little woman stood her ground, blue-veined hand on the doorknob. “Is this the detective?” She jerked her tightly curled head at me.

  “Yes, this is—”

  “What if something happens to her?”

  “Like what?”

  “What if she falls on the stairs? Or get hurt prowling around in the basement? This is an old building; plenty of things can happen. The owner wouldn’t like—”

  “The owner has insurance to cover things like that. Besides” — Carolyn glanced at me, faint amusement in her eyes — “Ms. McCone has been a detective for many years. She can take care of herself.”

  Mary Zemanek looked doubtful. “It’s a funny job for a woman. I’d feel better if it you brought a man.”

  “Well, it can’t be helped.”

  “Mrs. Zemanek,” Carolyn raised her voice a little. “I would like your permission for Ms. McCone to look over the building.”

  “What if I refuse?”

  “That, of course, is your right. But if she’s denied access, we might have to call the police in to investigate instead. You can’t refuse to let them on the premises.”

  A look of guile came into the old lady’s pale eyes. “The police were here before and they didn’t find anything.”

  “They can always come back again. And this time they might discover something.”

  The manager’s lips tightened into a thin line, and she glared at Carolyn. Then she said, “All right, let her look over the hotel if she wants. But the police didn’t find anything, and she won’t either. If you ask me, everyone’s in a stew over nothing. I don’t hear noises. I don’t see shadows.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Zemanek.” Carolyn turned to me. “Shall we start with the basement and work up to the roof?”

  “That’s fine with me.”

  Mary Zemanek said, “You can’t go out on the roof. Door’s always locked. The owner doesn’t like—”

  “Perhaps you’ll let us have the key.” Carolyn held out her hand.

  The manager looked at it, then shrugged and took a key off a ring that was hooked to the belt loop of her plain black dress. “If you get hurt, it’s not my fault.”

  “Don’t worry,” Carolyn said, pocketing the key. “We’ll be careful.” She started for a fire door in the wall opposite the desk.

  Mary Zemanek came out of her apartment and walked
stiffly over to the desk, one hand pressed to the small of her back. She removed a couple of advertising circulars that had been left there, then contemplated the Christmas tree. “I should take that down. It’s a fire hazard. Those packages are an invitation to thieves.”

  Carolyn turned, looking as if she was about to make a reference to Ebenezer Scrooge.

  “I won’t, though,” Mrs. Zemanek went on. “Someone would only put another one in its place.” She paused, still studying the tree, then added wistfully, “Besides, it looks nice. And the owner probably won’t show up again until after the New Year.” Slowly she walked back to her apartment.

  Carolyn and I pushed through the fire door and went down a hall, past three other apartments, to a second door. “She’s not as tough as she tries to act,” I said.

  “Mary? No. She’s as frightened by these goings-on as anyone here, but she feels she has to set a brave example. Her way of doing that is to pretend nothing’s happening.” Carolyn held open the second fire door and I stepped onto a stairway landing.

  The walls were the same dull green as in the hallway, and the steps were gray concrete with worn metal tread. A bare bulb gleamed in a ceramic wall fixture. The door shut behind us with a sigh from its pneumatic mechanism.

  “This is the stairwell where the kids saw the shadows.” Carolyn’s voice bounced hollowly off the walls that enclosed us.

  “Which way first?” I asked. “Up or down?”

  “Down, I think.” She reached for a switch next to the door and a light flashed on below. I started down there, clutching the cold metal railing, my footsteps echoing.

  “What about the owner?” I asked. “Mrs. Zemanek’s attitude toward him seems to stop just short of reverence.”

  “I think it’s more like the fear of God. His name is Roy LaFond, and he’s by no means your typical slum landlord.”

  “I’ve heard the name somewhere.”

  “LaFond is a big Marin County real estate developer. He did that Bay Shores condominium project in Tiburon.”

  “That’s why it sounds familiar. How’d he end up owning a place like this?”

  “Mrs. Zemanek says he took it as part of a larger deal about a year ago. You know—the sort of thing where the former owner wanted to unload it and gave LaFond a lower price on some property he really wanted in exchange for taking the Globe off his hands. Anyway, LaFond seems genuinely horrified to possess a Tenderloin hotel full of Vietnamese and other social misfits.”

  We reached the bottom of the stairway and stopped. To our right was a bank of plywood storage lockers, most of them secured with padlocks. Straight ahead was the gray metal hulk of a furnace. And to one side of the furnace a clumsy old-fashioned boiler stood on absurd spindly legs. It reminded me of a big white cow that had grown too fat for her underpinnings.

  “Quiet down here, isn’t it?” I said. “The furnace isn’t on. Is one of the disputes you mentioned about heat?” Heat was a major problem in the Tenderloin. A few years ago the morning paper had run a series of articles exposing the “heat cheats,” landlords whose skimping forced tenants—the majority of whom were elderly and needed more warmth than most people to stay healthy—to wear coats at all hours and sleep in several layers of clothing. As a result, the city inspectors had swept the hotels, demanding proof that they were being heated the legally requisite eleven hours per day. Owners had been fined, some had been jailed, and compliance had been forced. But now heat was a dead issue, having been milked by the media for all it was worth, and many hotels had become cold once again.

  “No,” Carolyn said. “Roy LaFond stays strictly within the letter of the law.”

  “I noticed the hotel is better maintained than most.”

  “No thanks to the owner. The Vietnamese are a tidy people; they can’t abide dirt, and they don’t wait for someone else to clean up after them. This place was a pigsty when we moved the first family in over two years ago. You’d never know that now.”

  I nodded and looked around the basement. It was as tidy as the upstairs halls, and there didn’t seem to be anyplace a person could hide. The storage lockers were flush against the walls. A small person might be able to squeeze behind the furnace, but that was the first place any searcher would look. And the walls were all solid cinderblock; there were no niches, vents, or other recesses. I supposed someone could have climbed up on the overhead heat ducting, but it didn’t look like it would support much more than a child’s weight.

  I went over to the boiler and touched its curving side; it was warm. “Plenty of hot water.”

  “Yes.”

  “So what were the disputes over, then?”

  “LaFond stays too much within the law. He’s deathly afraid of being cited or having something happen that will force his insurance rates up. He’s always issuing directives through Mary Zemanek—they’re perfectly legal but they make like here very rough.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, for one thing, the children are not allowed to play in the halls or the lobby. That creates a difficult situation for tenants with active youngsters. The stairs are officially off limits to them too. And that makes things damned near impossible when the elevator’s not working.” Anger had come into Carolyn’s voice; even in the dim light I could see that her face was flushed.

  “I take it the rules aren’t always observed, since Billy and Jenny saw shadows in the stairwell.”

  “Of course they’re not! They’re ridiculous. And this thing about the roof being locked—there’s a lot of room up there, and high barriers so no one could possibly fall. It would be an ideal place for the children to play, plus the people could grow vegetables in containers. The tenants got together and petitioned LaFond to let them use it. His reply? A flat ‘no’ delivered through Mary Zemanek.”

  “What about the Christmas tree? Would he really demand it be removed, as Mrs. Zemanek hinted?”

  “He’d probably throw it in the trash himself—plus rip the decorations off the fire escape. To the Roy LaFonds of the world, the Vangs and the others here simply aren’t people with normal human needs. They’re rent-paying units. And if the laws didn’t prevent it, you can bet their rents would have tripled in the last year.”

  I watched Carolyn, surprised at her vehemence. I’d seen her under some of the worst of circumstances, and she’d always been rational and controlled. Too controlled, perhaps. I was glad to glimpse this fire under her cool exterior.

  In the silence, she began shaking her head ruefully. “Forgive me, but I get so angry. In my work I see too many people like the Vangs, who have been through so much. They’ve fled their homeland, lost everything, and yet they go on striving. To me, they’re heroic people; to Roy LaFond, who’s had everything handed to him all his life, they’re dirt.”

  I thought about that, then said cautiously, “Do you really know that Roy LaFond had it so easy?”

  She shrugged and turned away. “I know the type. And now we’d better take a look at the rest of the stairwell and the roof. I assume you’ve seen all you want to down here.”

  “I will have in a minute.” I went over to the storage lockers and began opening those that weren’t secured by padlocks. The first two were empty; the third contained a cardboard roach trap and a box of miscellaneous nails and screws; the fourth was crammed with some sort of dark material. I pulled it out and spread it on the floor.

  It was a sheet, an old, tattered one, in an ugly olive green. There were two neatly cut holes near its center. I picked it up and held the holes to my eyes.

  “What’s that?” Carolyn said.

  “Looks like your basic Halloween ghost costume.”

  “In dark green? I doubt it. Besides, what’s it doing down here?”

  “Maybe some former tenant forgot it. Or . . .” I looked thoughtfully at the sheet.

  Carolyn waited.

  “You know,” I said, “this could be what the prankster uses to make those shadows on the stairwell walls. A person could look very scary in shadow
if he was wearing this and waving the material around.”

  “I guess so. But if that’s the case, why didn’t Mrs. Zemanek or Duc and his friends find it when they investigated down here?”

  “If you recall, they were looking for a person who was making noise in this room, not the creature in the stairwell. Besides, even if they’d seen this, to them it probably would have been just an old sheet.”

  She looked dubious, but didn’t say anything.

  I bundled the sheet up and stuffed it under my arm. “I’ll bring it along tonight and ask if anyone knows who it belongs to. If no one recognizes it, this could be our first concrete evidence that someone really is trying to frighten these people.” Then I motioned at the stairs. “Let’s see if we can find anything on the roof.”

  We went up seven flights, and Carolyn unlocked the door to the roof. As she had said, there were high concrete parapets around the periphery, topped by a tall chain-link barrier. It might not be a good place for children to play unsupervised, but under the eye of a vigilant adult, no harm could possibly come to them. And there was ample room for a container garden.

  I made a thorough search, finding nothing, then crossed to the west side and looked out over the rooftops. I was beginning to feel some of the same anger Carolyn had expressed, and as if she sensed that, she came up beside me and said, “You know, sometimes I feel so helpless. There’s so much these people—my people—need and so little I can do for them. The Center doesn’t have the staff or the money. Every year we think we won’t get re-funded, and there’s always a two-month gap when we exist on credit and do without salary waiting to hear what the government agencies and private foundations will dole out to us. And then I see someone like Roy LaFond, who could help if he wanted to ...”

  “I think I understand.”

  She studied my face for a moment, then nodded decisively. “Yes, I guess you do.”

  I looked back out over San Francisco, seeing the squalid roofs of the Tenderloin and, beyond them, the curves of the hills and skyscrapers where the rich people lived. More and more lately it seemed to me that there was so much unnecessary waste in the world, waste of our precious resources—be they forests or endangered species of animals. Or people. And most of it stemmed from the same reason that made Roy LaFond keep this roof locked and off limits. Simple cowardice—the inability to take a personal risk or make a stand for what one knew was right—was dressed up as looking out for Number One, as watching out for that old bottom line.