The Shape of Dread Read online

  I went back to the living room, curled up on the couch, and studied the legal pad that I’d filled with notes. There were inconsistencies in Foster’s confession: he claimed the car he’d stolen was green, rather than blue; that he’d been absent from the club all night, rather than returning shortly before the two-o’clock closing, as his fellow valets had testified; that he’d abandoned the car by the side of the road, rather than in another ravine. From the trial transcript I’d learned that he’d been unable to lead investigators to the place where he’d disposed of the body. The location of the apartment where he’d killed Tracy had never been pinpointed, nor had the “dude who hangs out at the club” who had sublet it to him ever been identified. And there was the question of the quarrel he and Kostakos reportedly had on the sidewalk in front of the club: if he’d merely offered her a ride, why had they fought? Altogether I had several pages of notes on the holes in the case against Foster.

  The fingerprints in the car, for instance: if it was one Foster had parked earlier, it would seem natural for his prints to be there. And the fact that he’d never followed up on the ransom demand: he had nothing to lose by doing so. True, there were damning facts in the confession, but he could have gleaned those during the hours of interrogation before the videotaping began. The others-the grim but unverifiable details of what he had done to Kostakos-could have been the product of an overactive imagination. And it bothered me that the chief investigating officer, Ben Gallagher, had seemed to prompt Foster’s responses. The suspect had repeatedly employed the phrase “like you say,” which led me to believe Gallagher had put quite a few ideas into his head.

  Too bad I couldn’t ask Ben about that. He’d been shot to death the previous month by a speed freak resisting arrest after murdering his wife and small son.

  I yawned and realized my comfort drink had done its magic work. But I couldn’t go to bed, not yet. I had to call Jack, who-fortunately-was a night person and would be up for hours yet.

  Still, I hesitated, running my eyes over the list that Jack had provided of precedents in no-body cases: People v. Alviso, People v. Clark, People v. Ward and Fontenot….Cases tried from 1880 to 1985, in which proof of the corpus delicti had been “legally inferred from such strong and unequivocal circumstances as produce conviction to a moral certainty.”

  Strong and unequivocal circumstances?

  Maybe. Maybe not.

  I reached for the phone and punched out All Souls’ number. Jack answered; in the background I could hear the mutter of the TV, probably tuned to an old movie.

  I said, “Did you get my name added to Foster’s list of authorized visitors?”

  “Yes, when I went up there this afternoon. I talked to him about you, so he’ll know who you are and why you’re there.”

  “Good. I’ll go in the morning.”

  “What did you think of the material I gave you?”

  “You were right-the confession’s damned brutal. And I didn’t like it one bit. But…”

  “But?”

  “There’s something about it that makes me want to reserve judgment until after I talk with him.”

  3

  By the time I arrived at All Souls’ shabby Bernal Heights Victorian that Thursday after returning from San Quentin, I had put aside the remainder of my reservations about the Foster case and was eager to get to work on it. I seemed to be the only person around there in a working mood, however: no clients waited in the front parlor, and the doors to the offices and law library stood open, the rooms’ interiors dark. Ted Smalley, our secretary, sat at his desk, but his computer keyboard was covered, and he was idly perusing one of those tabloids that are trying to outdo the National Enquirer.

  As I came in, he murmured, “What will that madcap Sean Penn do next?”

  “Pardon me for interrupting your studies,” I said.

  Ted raised the paper so I could see the headline: CRAZED KILLER CANNIBAL PLANNED TO COOK NIXON. He knows his passion for sleaze irritates me, so he takes every opportunity to flaunt it. “What can I do for you?” he asked.

  “Is either Rae or Jack around?”

  “Jack, no. Rae’s in the attic.”

  It was an unlikely place to find my assistant, Rae Kelleher. “What on earth is she doing up there?”

  “You’ll see.” He smiled mysteriously. “You coming to the New Year’s Eve party?”

  “Yes. I even have a new dress for it.”

  “So do I.”

  I looked more closely at him, to see if he was serious.

  “Not really,” he added. “This is a pretty off-the-wall outfit, but I think most people would frown upon me showing too much décolletage.”

  “You never know. I for one would find it amusing.” I headed for the stairs, and Ted went back to his sleaze.

  I dropped my coat, bag, and briefcase in my office at the front of the second floor, then followed a series of banging noises, interspersed with curses, to the attic. The noises came from the rear of the cavernous, drafty space; the cursing voice belonged to Rae Kelleher. I stopped and smiled, listening. Rae’s typical expletives were along the lines of “Oh, rats!” I’d never realized she possessed such a colorful vocabulary. As I made my way back to her, I weaved through assorted cartons, trunks, suitcases, and mismatched furniture-things that staff members who lived in the small second-story rooms couldn’t squeeze in, plus the castoffs of others no longer in residence.

  Rae stood by the rear dormer window, holding a hammer and sucking her thumb. She is a tiny woman with curly auburn hair, who dresses with a ratty artlessness that never ceases to amaze me. Today she had outdone herself: candy-striped, paint-stained pants with the widest bell-bottoms I’d seen since 1970; a baggy purple sweater covered with those balls of fuzz I call sweater mice; a yellow polka-dot bandanna holding back her hair. There was a big streak of dirt on her forehead, and a bigger scowl on her round, freckled face. When she saw me, she took her thumb from her mouth and said, “Dammit, why did my mother teach me to sew instead of how to hit nails right?”

  I looked around. There was a stack of Sheetrock leaning against one wall; insulation had been stapled between the exposed studs. “What in God’s name are you doing?”

  She stuck the thumb back in her mouth and said around it, “Making a room for myself. I’m sick of living in my office.”

  In September, Rae had separated from her perpetual-student husband and moved into All Souls. All the rooms were occupied, so she set up housekeeping in her office-my former one-which is really nothing more than a converted closet under the stairs. Being crowded was okay with her, she’d said. It was only a temporary arrangement-until a room opened up, or the couples counseling worked and she and Doug got back together.

  I sat down on a rolled-up rug and said, “I take it your Christmas trip to see Doug’s parents didn’t go too well.”

  She snorted. “That’s putting it mildly. His whole family blames me because the asshole made that fake suicide attempt last fall. His mother had the nerve to tell me if I paid more attention to him, it wouldn’t have happened. It was cold in Ohio, and neither of us brought enough warm clothes. So his mother went out and bought her Dougie two new sweaters, but nothing for me. Then I found out he hadn’t even told them we weren’t living together anymore. When I corrected that impression, his father lectured me on a wife’s duties to her husband. Never mind a husband’s duties-little things like respecting his wife’s rights or being truthful. Oh no, those things don’t apply to their Dougie. No wonder he turned out the way he did!” She paused, suddenly shamefaced. “Sorry. I know I shouldn’t rant like that. But every time I think about it, I just…fulminate!”

  “I don’t blame you.” Rae had come a long way in a few months: from a woman who neglected her job to rush to her husband’s side every time he snapped his fingers, to a full-scale fulminator. I motioned around us. “Does this mean you’re divorcing him?”

  “Yeah. The couples therapy has proved to me that we can’t go on. Every week more
and more things come out about both of us. Perfectly swinish things about Doug, and things I don’t like much about myself, either. I can work to improve my bad character, but there’s nothing I can do about his.”

  “So when are you filing?”

  “Soon. Trouble is, I’ve only got twenty-nine dollars in my checking account.” Momentarily she looked glum, then brightened. “But Hank loaned me a book about how to do your own divorce, and even offered to help me. I guess I can scrape together the filing fee.”

  I considered offering to loan it to her but decided against such partisan behavior. I’d long ago learned to stay out of friends’ marital hassles; whenever I’d taken sides, they’d reconciled, and I’d ended up the villainous party.

  “Hank’s been awfully helpful,” Rae added. “I was afraid he wouldn’t want me putting in a room up here, but he said yes right away and even talked the owner into paying for the insulation and Sheetrock.”

  Hank Zahn, founder and nominal leader of All Souls, was great at talking people into all sorts of things. Too bad, I thought, he wasn’t any good with a hammer. And speaking of marital hassles…”Has Hank been around this week?” I asked.

  “Not much.”

  “Anne-Marie?” Anne-Marie Altman, our tax attorney, was my good friend and Hank’s wife.

  “Haven’t seen her, but I only got back from Ohio on Monday.”

  “Well, I suppose they’ll be at the party Saturday night.”

  “If they’re speaking to each other.”

  “You’ve noticed, too.”

  “Can’t help but. Frankly, I think what they need is separate houses. There are some people who love each other but can’t live together.”

  “Maybe,” I said, thinking of my former relationship with a certain police lieutenant. “Anyway, I need to talk to you about a case. I hate to interrupt this…project, but-”

  “Don’t worry. I need a break. I only have one more thumb, you know.” She sat down next to me on the rolled-up rug.

  I told her about the Foster case, pointing out what I thought were holes and inconsistencies.

  When I finished, Rae was silent for a moment. “Oh boy,” she finally said, “twenty years old and on death row! What sort of a kid is this Bobby Foster, anyway?”

  I restrained a smile at her use of the work “kid”; Rae herself was only twenty-five. “He’s okay, once you get past the tough-guy attitude-which is understandable, given where he is. Grew up in the projects-Potrero Annex. One of seven kids, father skipped out before he was born, mother’s had two other husbands, both gone now, too. She’s an activist-organized a watch program for her building and was instrumental in establishing the Potrero Medical Clinic.”

  “I’ve heard of it. Didn’t they just get some big foundation grant?”

  I nodded. “Mrs. Whitsun-Leora Whitsun-works at the clinic now, doing intake and records. She’s getting a pretty good salary and wants to move her younger kids out of the projects. Her connection with the clinic has bearing on the case, too. The club owner I mentioned, Jay Larkey, was a dentist before he turned to stand-up comedy, and he still keeps his hand in. He volunteers two afternoons a week at the clinic, which is how he met Mrs. Whitsun and came to hire Foster as a parking attendant when he got out of the CYA.”

  “And he was in the CYA for…?”

  “He’d been running drugs since he was nine. The last time, he was in for assaulting a dealer who had cheated him. There were other offenses relating more to his violent temper than to drugs. Right before Kostakos disappeared, though, he’d begun to turn his life around. His mother’s a very gutsy woman, and underneath it all, Bobby has the same basic toughness.”

  Rae nodded thoughtfully. “So what do you need me to do?”

  “First, set up some appointments for me. I called the victim’s mother from the pay phone at San Quentin, and she agreed to see me after three.” I looked at my watch. “I’ve got to leave in a few minutes in order to get down to Palo Alto on time. See if you can catch the roommate, Amy Barbour, at work and arrange for me to meet her at the apartment around six or seven. If that’s okay, set up something with George Kostakos for tomorrow, the same with Mrs. Whitsun and the boyfriend, Marc Emmons. I’ll drop in at Café Comedie and talk with the people there this evening.”

  “Phone numbers?”

  “I’ll leave the file on my desk.” I stood up. “You probably should read it and the trial transcript, plus look at the video-if you can stomach it.”

  “If I can stomach a week with Doug’s family-”

  I cut her off; the tape was nothing to joke about. “I’ll probably want you to verify some of the facts turned up in the police investigation, as well as run checks to see if there’s been any activity in Kostakos’s checking or charge accounts-that sort of thing. But that can wait until tomorrow.”

  “Right. What about the investigator in charge of the case? Do you want me to contact him?”

  “Can’t-he’s dead. But there’s somebody I know in the department who might pull the file for me-if I ask nicely.”

  Greg Marcus, my former lover, would be at the New Year’s Eve party on Saturday-and my new dress was low cut and red, the color he liked best on me.

  4

  Laura Kostakos had told me to take the University Avenue exit off Highway 101. As I did, I felt a stab of nostalgia for my college days, when I’d dated a Stanford grad student who lived near the interchange, in the area that is actually part of the troubled community of East Palo Alto but then had been almost as desirable as Palo Alto itself. His was a long street lined with nothing but apartment buildings; they ranged from no-frills to luxury complexes replete with swimming pools and putting greens. I’d attended some of the best parties of my life on that street, but those days, a friend who lived in Palo Alto had recently told me, are gone.

  Now, she said, even the most opulent of the complexes are showing signs of the hasty, poor-quality construction that dooms them to early obsolescence. Their facades are cracked; their rooflines sag; the putting greens are weedy, the swimming pools filmed with mold. Instead of Stanford students and young professionals and naval officers from Moffett field, they are largely tenanted by working-class blacks who have moved across the freeway from East Palo Alto proper, looking for a better life.

  As I drove past the bars and liquor stores and shabby businesses on the stretch of University Avenue known locally as Whiskey Gulch, I reflected on the stinginess and hypocrisy of a society that rewards its aspiring minorities with the ruling class’s leavings, then tries to claim the neighborhood is declining because of the “new element” that’s moved in. The decaying apartments of east Palo Alto were several cuts above the decrepit Potrero Hill projects where Bobby Foster grew up-World War II-vintage cell blocks where fear and violence lurk in every enclosed staircase and entryway-but they weren’t much when you considered how hard their occupants had worked to get there.

  At the end of the strip of businesses, a sign announced I was entering Palo Alto itself. The neighborhood changed: stately trees arched over the pavement; handsome homes decked with Christmas wreaths stood far back on manicured lawns; the cars in the driveways were Mercedeses and Cadillacs and sports models. Palo Alto is a reasonably liberal town that prides itself on culture and intellect (while determinedly avoiding the strident radicalism of such academic enclaves as Berkeley), so I was fairly sure that not all the blacks on this side of the dividing line would be wearing starched uniforms-but I also suspected there wouldn’t be enough bona fide minority residents to hold a chapter meeting of the NAACP.

  Chaucer Street, where Laura Kostakos lived, was one of a number in the exclusive Crescent Park district that were named after literary figures. Her house was Spanish style-a two-storied, white stucco with a red-tiled roof. The front lawn was full of big dead patches; a loose rain gutter rattled in the wind. Behind the mulberry tree that shaded the arching front window, I could see drawn drapes. The magnolia tree near the door had dropped its leaves on the brick walk,
and nobody had bothered to clean them up. As I rang the bell, I noted the absence of any kind of Christmas decoration.

  Mrs. Kostakos took a long time answering my ring. When the door finally opened, I saw a tall woman with graying blond hair worn loose upon her shoulders. It was a style that would have looked too youthful on many women in their late forties, but on her it seemed right, imparting a fragile air that enhanced her fine bone structure. Her blue velvet lounging pajamas-curious attire for three in the afternoon-hung loose on her, giving the impression that she had lost a great deal of weight; she’d applied no makeup to hide the dark half-moons under her eyes.

  She thanked me for coming, even though I was the one who had requested the interview. Then she led me down a long, narrow gallery lined with spotlighted oil paintings and sculpture on pedestals. The air in the gallery was chill. Laura Kostakos moved stiffly, in the gait of a much older woman. As the folds of her pajamas rippled, I caught the scent of a gardenialike perfume I’d always associated with my maternal grandmother.

  At the far end of the gallery was a living room whose dark exposed ceiling beams radiated out to a curving wall containing a series of five small window seats. The windows encased within the jutting sections of wall admitted little light; through them I could see a free-form swimming pool that looked as if it had been carved from lava rock. The murky midafternoon light sheened the black water.

  The living room itself was gloomy. Shadows gathered in its far reaches, where glass-fronted bookcases hulked; on the table at the L of the sectional sofa, a single low-wattage lamp burned, giving off a dim halo of light. The chill I’d felt in the gallery penetrated here, too. I glanced at the stone fireplace, saw the grate was choked with dead ashes.

  Laura Kostakos motioned for me to sit on the sofa. I took a place next to the table with the lamp. She positioned herself on a ladder-back chair across from me.