There's Nothing to Be Afraid Of Read online

  “Babe and Blue Ox. A statue. Thirteen feet high. I got him when they tore down the Paul Bunyan Drive-in in Corvallis, Oregon.”

  “Good Lord.”

  Abruptly Knox’s manner changed. He leaned forward on the desk and looked at me intently. “Now what’s this about Brother Harry and Jimmy?”

  I explained about the problems at the Globe Hotel and the suspicions that were circulating through the neighborhood. Knox listened carefully, squinting at me through a haze of smoke. When I finished, he said, “I don’t know, honey. Both of the boys are as crazy as loons, but to frighten a bunch of slopes . . .”

  Inwardly I winced at the cruel term, which had come home from Vietnam with the American military.

  “I don’t know,” Knox repeated. “Harry’s just a lunatic, has some half-cocked ideas about God. And Jimmy’s a poor homeless bastard who’s been run from pillar to post. It doesn’t seem likely either of them—”

  “Tell me about them.”

  He shifted in his chair, stuck one booted foot up on the corner of the desk, and leaned his head back. “Well, Harry’s been around for years. Mostly preaches on this corner; I guess he thinks it’s some kind of antidote for my films.”

  “Does he live in the neighborhood?”

  “Yeah, he’s got a room in a flophouse over on Turk Street. He’s here rain or shine, hollering about salvation. Sometimes I chase him off, just for form’s sake, but usually I let him rant.”

  “What’s his last name?”

  Knox paused. “Woods, I think. But I wouldn’t swear to it.”

  Do you know how he feels about the Vietnamese who have been moving into the area?”

  “We’ve never discussed it. Probably the same as he feels about everybody else—that they’re sinners who’ve got to be brought to God.”

  “What about Harry’s background? Has he ever said where he came from?”

  “No. He’s been around here as long as I have, maybe fifteen years.”

  “And you don’t know how he got the way he is?”

  Knox shrugged. “How do any of us get crazy?”

  It was a good question. “What about the man you called Jimmy? Who’s he?”

  “Jimmy Milligan. Sad case. He’s educated—you can tell that, the way he recites poetry. Yeats. Always Yeats, nothing else. But his moods go up and down fast, without much warning.”

  I’d noticed that a little while ago. “Is he violent?”

  Knox smiled, a little surprised. “Jimmy? Hell, no. Just real happy or real sad. One minute he’ll be grinning like an idiot—like he was out at Harry—next he’s looking like he might cry. Does cry, sometimes. Stands there on the street and bawls.”

  “You said something about him being homeless.”

  “Yeah. Jimmy’s one of these proud people—won’t take welfare or sleep at the Salvation Army or Glide Memorial. He sets up places to live in abandoned buildings, old newspaper kiosks, in the holes at construction sites. You name it, Jimmy’s tried it. Makes the places pretty nice—I remember one time he even hung curtains in this big wooden crate somebody left in an alley. But the cops always come along and roust him. The cops or the people who own the property or the housing authority. Happens every time.”

  “Where does Jimmy live now?”

  Knox shrugged. “Who knows? It’s been a couple of months since he was chased off that lot where the Rendezvous Bar burned down over on Ellis Street.”

  “Why does Jimmy taunt Brother Harry?”

  “Why would anybody taunt Harry? He’s got no sense of humor and a real short fuse. It’s kind of fun to watch him explode.”

  Some people, I reflected, had an odd idea of fun. “Let me ask you this, Mr. Knox,” I said. “Do you have any idea of who might be trying to frighten the people at the Globe?”

  He hesitated, as if he were trying to decide whether to say something or not. I waited. Finally he took his foot off the desk and said, “I’ve got no ideas. None at all. I’m just a country boy, trying to make a living as best I can. I’ll tell you—I should have been a cowhand. I come into the city every day, do my bit, but by nightfall, I’m back on the ranch with my horses.”

  “I see.” It was the same folksy line he’d trotted out for the newspaper reporter. “But you’re here in the neighborhood every day. Don’t you hear things—”

  “Honey, I got three theatres to run. This is my headquarters, but I’m out half the time at the other two. And there’s the production company, and the hassles with the D.A., and the lawyers. . . I tell you, I’m up to my ears in work. I got no time to entertain ideas about who’s trying to scare a bunch of slopes.”

  I merely watched him. After a moment, he added, “Yeah, honey, I’m real busy. The business is growing; we’re making a big move.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. You know the old Crystal Palace Theatre over on Market Street?”

  I nodded.

  “I bought it last week. Going to consolidate operations, give this town the biggest and best adult entertainment center ever.”

  The Crystal Palace Theatre was one of the ornate relics left over from the early part of the century. It had been standing empty and unused for years now. Several preservationist groups had attempted to have historical landmark status approved for it, but so far had been unsuccessful. I frowned, wondering if their membership knew of Otis Knox’s plans for the structure.

  Knox didn’t seem to notice my displeasure. He lit another cigarette and leaned back in his chair again, his eyes dreamy through the smoke. “It’s some place, that theatre. Downright Shabby now, but what a history it’s got. You know anything about it?”

  “No, but—”

  “The first Crystal Palace was built in the 1860s. They called those time the ‘Sensation Era’—and I guess it sure was. Variety shows. Burlesques. Minstrels. Performers like Lotta Crabtree, Eddie Foy, Lola Montez. You heard of them?”

  I nodded, surprised at his interest in the history of his purchase.

  “Yeah, those were some days,” Knox went on. “Of course, the original theatre was destroyed in the oh-six ‘quake and fire. Only one in the city—I forget which—survived. But they rebuilt, and then you had vaudeville and all that. They say the owners of the Crystal Palace even built a speakeasy under Market Street during Prohibition. Tunneled right out there under the streetcar tracks, and all the fancy ladies and gentlemen would sit and tipple while the cars rumbled over their heads.”

  “Have you seen the speakeasy?”

  “Nope. They say the tunnel was closed off in the thirties. I say the story’s pure legend. Otherwise they’d have found it when they excavated for BART and the Muni Metro. But if it existed—what couldn’t I do with it! Anyway, the theatre fell on hard times after the movies came in. For a while in the seventies some promoter tried to convert it for rock concerts, but they didn’t go over. Kids who go to things like that need space, don’t want to be told to stay in their seats. So the place has been standing empty for years.”

  “And now it’s going to become a porn palace.”

  I’d expected that to annoy him, but he merely shrugged. “I don’t pretend to be any better than I am. It’s a business, that’s all.”

  At that moment the door opened behind me. I glanced back and saw a gangly youth with limp black hair standing there. “Mr. Knox,” he said, “there’s something wrong with the projector.”

  “Christ, Arnie, now what?”

  The youth gestured vaguely; he looked half stoned. “I don’t know. Can you come?”

  “In a minute.” Knox stood up. The projectionist went out and Knox smiled at me, spreading his arms in a placating gesture. “Look,” he said, “I’m not the bad guy everybody thinks I am. You ought to get to know me better. You should come over to Nicasio sometime—play the jukeboxes, a little pinball. I’ll even introduce you to Babe the Blue Ox.”

  Unwilling to offend him in case I needed additional information later on, I said, “You know, Mr. Knox, maybe someday I’ll take y
ou up on that offer. Babe sounds like quite a guy.”

  Neither Brother Harry nor Jimmy Milligan was in sight when I emerged from the theatre, and the people on the street were the usual ragtag assortment. Once again I checked my watch, and since I had a little time before I had to leave for San Raphael, I went back to the Globe Hotel in hopes of talking with Sallie Hyde.

  I didn’t have to look far for her. She stood in the center of the lobby, clutching one of the branches from the Christmas tree. Mary Zemanek was in the doorway to her apartment, and two Vietnamese children—preschoolers—peeked out from behind the desk.

  The little plastic tree had been ripped apart, branches and smashed ornaments strewn all over the floor. The packages looked as if they had been stomped on. Both of the women and children were very still.

  I said, “What’s happened here?”

  Sallie turned slowly. Her eyes were full of shock and grief. “Someone . . .” She motioned feebly with the tree branch.

  Mary Zemanek cleared her throat. “It’s what comes of setting out a temptation in the middle of a neighborhood like this.” But under the stern words, I could tell she was shaken too.

  “When did this happen?” I asked.

  Sallie shook her head.

  “It had to be within the last hour,” Mary said. “Since you and that woman from the Refugee Center were here.” She paused, then said to Sallie, “I trust you’ll see this is cleaned up?”

  The fat woman merely nodded. Mary went back into her apartment. I looked for the children, but hey had disappeared.

  “You don’t suppose she . . .?” I motioned toward Mary’s door.

  “No.” Sallie sighed heavily and began gathering the torn branches. “Mary liked the tree as much as any of us; she just didn’t want to be responsible.”

  I knelt and began helping her. “Who, then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The same person who’s been trying to scare all of you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I found something this morning, in the basement. An old olive-green sheet with eyeholes in it. Someone could have worn it to make those shadows in the stairwell.”

  Sallie continued picking up fragments of ornaments.

  “Have you every seen anyone with that sheet?”

  She paused, then shook her head. “No.”

  I swept some small fragments of red glass together, then looked for a receptacle to put them in. “Will you get a new tree?”

  “I don’t know.” She straightened up and set the debris she’d gathered on the reception desk. “I loaned this tree to the hotel; it seemed so much better to share it than to keep it in my room. But now I wish I hadn’t. I liked the tree. I’ve had it for years. Ever since . . . every since I came to the hotel. Who would do such a thing?” Her words were tinged with resignation that verged on despair.

  I pushed the last of the ornament fragments together, being careful not to cut myself. “That’s what I’m going to find out.”

  Sallie went around the desk and dragged out a wastebasket. She dropped the wreckage that sat on the desk into it, then helped me dispose of the pieces of glass. “The city’s changing,” she said as she stood up. “This never would have happened before.”

  “Before what?”

  “Oh, nothing in particular. I mean, years ago. The city’s so different now. There’s so much anger in people. The other day I was in the crosswalk in front of Magnin’s, by the Square, where my flower stand is. Walking with the light. This guy in a sports car—nice-looking, well-dressed guy, what we used to think of as a gentleman—turns the corner, almost hits me. I jump back as he screeches on the brakes, and you know what he says to me? ‘Fuck you, lady.’” She finished dumping the remains of the gift packages into the basket, then placed it out of sign behind the desk.

  “‘Fuck you, lady,’” she repeated wearily. “And that, from what we used to call a gentleman.”

  I could see she was in no mood to answer the kind of questions I wanted to ask her, so I said, “Will you be home tonight, Sallie?”

  “Tonight? I’m always home at night. Don’t like to be on the streets after dark.”

  “I’ll stop by and see you then.”

  “Sure. Stop by any time.” The fat woman made her way to the elevator, looking years older than she had when I’d met her that morning.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Roy LaFond’s office was located north of downtown San Rafael, in a new area of industrial parks. I drove up there on Route 101, past rolling hills that were newly green from the early winter rains.

  Marin County presented a marked change from the Tenderloin. Expensive homes clung to the hillsides, commanding sweeping vistas of Mount Tamalpais and Richardson Bay. The marinas were choked with sailboats, chic shopping centers lined the freeway, and luxury cars roared by me as I nursed my ancient MG up the steep grades. This was affluent land—notorious for the somewhat hackneyed hot tub and peacock feather—the spiritual capital of the Me Generation. But Marin also had pockets of poverty; a soup kitchen in San Rafael was dispensing more free meals than ever before, and requests from charities for donation of clothing and household goods for the needy were well publicized. Like the Tenderloin, Marin had its problems, but they were easier to ignore amidst all this natural beauty.

  I exited from 101 at Freitas Parkway and took the curving off ramp over the freeway to Northgate Drive. It wound past a large shopping center, crowded with people seeking holiday gifts. LaFond’s building was a standard redwood-and-glass office complex on the right-hand side, just beyond Sears. I parked in front, went inside, and wandered the corridors for a few minutes before I found his suite.

  The reception area was furnished with good antiques and a central table displaying a relief map of the Bay Shores condominium project in Tiburon. No one was behind the desk. I waited, then cleared my throat loudly, and finally a young woman appeared in a doorway at the rear, her arms full of collated papers. Her hair straggled loose from a barrette at the nape of her neck and, despite the relative serenity of the offices, she appeared harried. “Oh,” she said, “you must be Roy’s two o’clock appointment.”

  I looked at my watch. It was two-ten. “Yes, I’m sorry I’m late.”

  The woman dumped the papers on the reception desk. “You may be late, but Roy’s later. He just called in five minutes ago and said he’s been delayed at the new job site. And he suggested you might want to meet him there, to save time.”

  “Where is the job site?”

  “Bay Shores East, over in Alameda County near Golden Gate Fields.”

  I considered. It was a relatively short drive from here, over the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, and later I could return to the city via the Bay Bridge. “All right, I’ll do that.”

  She gave me directions and said she would call LaFond on his car phone and tell him I was on my way. I went out to my car and retraced my route to the freeway.

  The approach to the bridge went past San Quentin prison, its high walls a deceptively pleasant peach color in the afternoon sun. The bridge’s span rose over the placid waters of the Bay, and then the road—its pavement roughened and scarred by the constant heavy truck traffic—cut through an industrial area and eventually joined the East-shore Freeway. LaFond’s condominium development was easy to spot, on a point of land that jutted out into the Bay near the big racetrack. Concrete pads had already been poured for the buildings, and steel girders rose skyward from them.

  I drove through the opening in the chain-link fence around the construction site and asked a man in a hardhat where to find Mr. LaFond. He pointed at three men who were leaning on the tailgate of a pickup truck, discussing some blueprints. “He’s the one with the white hair.”

  Leaving the car near the fence, I started toward the men. They looked around as I approached, and then the white-haired man said a few words to the others, slapped one on the shoulder, and came toward me. He was tall and slender, dressed in casual clothes that would be equally at home on
a construction site or a golf course, and his face was tanned and virtually unlined. The hair, I thought, had to be prematurely white.

  “Ms. McCone?” He extended his hand. “I’m Roy LaFond. Thanks for coming over here. I would have met you at the office, but a problem came up between my architect and my structural engineer that had to be resolved right away.”

  “No trouble.” I gestured at the steel girders. “I take it this is going to be another complex like the one you built in Tiburon.”

  He smiled in pleasure, laugh lines crinkling at the corners of his eyes. “You know Bay Shores, then?”

  “I’ve seen it from a distance.”

  “Well, Bay Shores East will be better. Five hundred units, two- and three-bedrooms. Pool, Jacuzzi, health spa, boat landing, full security, and—of course—the view of San Francisco across the Bay.” His voice was boyish and enthusiastic, lilting at the end of phrases.

  I took a good look at Roy LaFond and decided the grocer Hung Tran had been right—this was not a man to lurk in basements or frighten children in stairwells. Still, this might be a man who would hire someone to lurk . . .

  “. . . interested in buying one, I suppose?”

  I turned my attention back to what LaFond was saying. “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t suppose you would be interested in buying one of our units?”

  He seemed to be making a joke, but I sensed seriousness beneath the words. Roy LaFond, from what I’d heard of him, had made a lot of money for someone who couldn’t be more than forty, and he’d probably done so by never letting an opportunity to make a deal pass him by.

  I said, “Sorry, but I doubt I could afford one.” I didn’t add that I wouldn’t want one either. There had been a time when I’d thought I’d preferred sleek modern homes and furnishings. But the older I got, the more I leaned toward the traditional. My five-room cottage, built as emergency housing after the earthquake of 1906, suited me perfectly.

  At that moment, a flatbed truck bearing a load of steel rumbled through the gate. LaFond put a hand on my arm and moved me out of its path, in spite of it being many yards away. Leaning down toward me, he said, “My secretary tells me you want to talk about the Globe Hotel. Are you a prospective buyer?”