There's Something in a Sunday Read online

  “Well, everybody here misses him, too, but that marriage is important. Both of them took a risk later in life than most of us would have been brave enough to do, and they’ve invested a lot of themselves in it. They love each other. Besides”-I smiled, trying to cheer Jack, whose expression told me he was reliving his own failure-“he’d better not miss this place too much. I’m not giving my office back to him.”

  Jack didn’t seem to see the humor in the remark-and frankly, I didn’t blame him. He tilted his wineglass to get at the last drops, then went to the sink for a refill. “Maybe they’ll work it out. People who are set in their ways have been known to change.”

  “At our age? I wonder.” I hadn’t been able to change for Don, any more than he’d been able to change for me. I hoped Anne-Marie and Hank wouldn’t end up apart, as we had.

  Jack offered me more wine, but I declined and went to retrieve my coat from Rae’s office. Tonight I’d be better off sulking at home, where I couldn’t inflict my mood on anybody else.

  But when I got home, things began to look up. I found that my wandering cat, Watney, had returned and was curled in the center of my bed. When I flicked on the light, he looked up and started purring. I went to the kitchen and rooted around in the freezer; damned if there wasn’t a package of my favorite macaroni and cheese. While it heated, I cleared some of the mess from the kitchen and shut the door against the construction zone on the back porch. Then I took my dinner to bed and snuggled down with a good book. When I was done eating, I bribed Watney to come home more often by letting him lick the cheese residue from the aluminum-foil container.

  As I went about my business for the next few days, I tried to shove Rudy Goldring’s death to the back of my mind. Lord knows I had enough to contend with. Rae didn’t show up for work on either Tuesday or Wednesday; she called, claiming she had the flu, but she didn’t sound sick, and I attributed her absence to her continuing failure to stand up to her husband. As a result, the caseload piled up on my desk; one interview I’d turned over to her required I travel to Sacramento, losing half a day’s time in transit. My statement for the police about Goldring’s death took up the whole of one morning. It was late Thursday before I had a breather, and I was just thinking of calling Ben Gallagher at the SFPD to ask if they’d made any progress on the case when the phone buzzed, and it was Ben, calling me.

  Without preamble, he said, “Did you write down the license number of that woman’s BMW?”

  “Yes, I’ve still got it in my notebook. Hold on a second.” I grabbed my purse and rummaged through it. “One GDJ three two six.”

  “Shit. I was hoping you’d just read it to me wrong. But you must have got it garbled.”

  “Why?”

  “We traced the owner of the car. She’s not the woman you’re talking about, says she was in a meeting in her own living room at the time and the car was right outside in the driveway.”

  “Maybe she’s lying.”

  “No, she doesn’t match the description you gave me. And there are witnesses from the meeting who say the car was there. Besides, this isn’t a woman who avoids publicity-of any kind.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Vicky Cushman.”

  “Oh.”

  Vicky Cushman certainly didn’t hide from the limelight. She was one of the city’s most visible citizen-activists, always championing one cause or another-from saving the buffalo in the park to tearing down the unsightly Embarcadero Freeway. In recent years she’d devoted most of her attention to issues in the Haight-Ashbury district, where she lived.

  I’d met Vicky from time to time at All Souls functions. Her husband Gerry was a hotshot member of a downtown architecture firm and a close friend of one of our partners, and liberal activists like Vicky were always high on the co-op’s A list. Gallagher was understating it when he said she didn’t look like the woman I’d encountered at Goldring’s: Vicky was petite, had waist-length blond hair, and the kind of turned-up features we used to enviously term “cute” in high school.

  I said, “Maybe she loaned the car out, and the witnesses are lying.”

  “No, you got the number wrong. Did you write it down as soon as the woman drove away?”

  “There was a time lapse, until I could get hold of my notebook, but I repeated it over and over to myself.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Okay, maybe I got a letter or number out of place. Why don’t you-“But then I was struck by the statistical magnitude of checking every combination of those seven letters and numbers, coupled with the legendary inefficiency of the Department of Motor Vehicles.

  “Why don’t I what?”

  “Nothing. I was about to say something stupid. What about Frank Wilkonson? Were you able to trace him?”

  “Yeah, he works on a big cattle ranch near Hollister. Sheriff down there checked him out. He says he never heard of Rudy Goldring.”

  Hollister was near San Jose, not King City. Another of Goldring’s lies. “Did the sheriff ask him why he comes to the city on Sundays?”

  “He says he works six days a week on the ranch and comes up here to unwind.”

  “He unwinds by checking out the conservatory and plant sale, and visiting every nursery in town?”

  “That’s what he says.” I could picture Ben shrugging. After a moment he added, “The guy’s got six kids, Sharon. If I had six kids, plants might look good to me, too.”

  “Maybe,” I said dubiously. “I gather you haven’t located Bob, the derelict, yet.”

  “His full name’s Robert Choteau, and he’s disappeared from all his usual haunts. That in itself indicates guilt.”

  “Or fear.”

  “Whatever. We’ll locate him, but it’ll take time. He’s our only lead, since you muffed the license plate number.”

  It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him to go to hell. But I didn’t say it. Gallagher was overworked and tired; I was overworked and tired; he hadn’t meant it.

  I said, “Let me know how it goes, all right?”

  “I’ll let you know.” He hung up.

  I set the receiver in the cradle and pushed back my chair, staring out the window at the flat gray expanse of the Outer Mission. Dammit, I didn’t believe I had muffed the license plate number. I have a good head for figures; all I have to do is call a phone number once or twice and I have it memorized. Maybe Vicky Cushman and her witnesses were lying; it could even be for some innocuous reason, or out of sheer perversity. Liberal activists are never overly fond of cops….

  I felt I knew Vicky well enough to call her and ask about what she’d told the police. Better yet, I’d simply drop in at the somewhat peculiar home she and Gerry owned on the hill above the Haight. If my questions seemed to stem from a casual, spur-of-the-moment impulse, she’d most likely be open with me. I could say I wanted to verify that the car had indeed been hers for my own peace of mind. I could say I was concerned about the woman I’d run into at Goldring’s, wanted to make sure she was all right.

  Yes, I thought, that would be the best approach. And it was for my peace of mind; I hated to think I’d slipped up on something as simple as remembering a series of seven letters and numbers. I’d go over there right away-as soon as I’d called a friend at the DMV and asked her to get me Frank Wilkonson’s exact address in Hollister.

  SEVEN

  The Haight-Ashbury District is best known for the social and psychedelic explosion that took place there in the 1960s, but its history encompasses far more than the brief hippie era. It was originally settled by livestock farmers who staked out five- to ten-acre plots on the quiet eastern reaches of Golden Gate Park; with the expansion of the city’s rail service to the area, “suburbanites” followed, building the splendid Victorians that are so prized today. In the 1880s, excitement of a more wholesome sort than LSD trips was embodied by The Chutes, a Haight Street amusement park with a death-defying roller coaster. Long before the hippies discovered the district, bohemians and college students moved there for the ch
eap rents; after the hippies left, hard-case junkies and drug dealers took over.

  Today the Haight is a neighborhood in search of an identity. Spruced-up Victorians sit side-by-side with dilapidated apartment buildings that approach tenement status. Height Street itself-the commercial center-is a curious mélange of mom-and-pop stores that have been there for generations, chic new boutiques, bed-and-breakfast hotels, and the ever-encroaching chain outlets. Fashionable shoppers from the suburbs and more affluent areas of the city brush shoulders with the punks, junkies, and neighborhood mothers pushing baby strollers. Some residents fear the invasion of pizza parlors and twenty-four-hour drugstores will destroy the character of the district; others-many of them older people on fixed incomes-are grateful for the lower chain-store prices. Everyone is edgy about the way the University of California Medical Center keeps reaching down from Parnassus Heights to gobble up prime real estate. The Haight seems to be caught in a tug-of-war between gentrification and social responsibility. It is rich soil for neighborhood activists like Vicky Cushman.

  I crossed Buena Vista Heights on Seventeenth Street and drove downhill on Ashbury. It was one of those September days when you can tell summer is edging into fall: the sky was the hard clear blue of San Francisco’s autumn, and enough of the leaves were turning to signify a change. When I turned off Ashbury onto the Cushmans’ cul-de-sac just above Frederick Street, I was confronted by a row of tall Lombardy poplars whose brilliant yellow foliage was so achingly beautiful that it made my breath catch. Directly behind them was the ivy-shrouded brick wall of what local people have always referred to as The Castles. The Cushman Castles, now.

  The Castles were a grouping of six small, turreted buildings on a two-acre wooded lot. With the high wall surrounding the place, all that was visible from the street were the dark brick turrets, with their steeply canting slate roofs and mullioned upper windows. Each building served a different function: living area, master bedroom suite, children’s quarters, artist’s studio, servants’ quarters, and garage. They were connected only by stone paths through the gardens and lawn. Gerry Cushman’s friend at All Souls had told me that The Castles had been built in the 1930s by a minor newspaper publisher (who soon after had gone bankrupt) who considered himself a potential William Randolph Hearst. Presumably these buildings had been his dress rehearsal for creating his own San Simeon. Over the years they’d passed from hand to hand until the heirs of the last owner had let them stand empty in the 1970s, and they’d been taken over by squatters. Gerry Cushman had picked up the property for the value of the land alone in the early 1980s. after a lengthy court battle to evict the squatters, Gerry, Vicky, and their two children moved into The Castles and restored them to their former splendor.

  I parked my MG under the poplars and went over to the metal-studded wood gate. There was an intercom beside it; I pressed the button. When a static-distorted female voice answered, I identified myself and asked for Vicky. There was a pause and then the voice said, “This is she. I’ve met you, haven’t I? At All Souls?”

  “Yes. I think the last time was at our Christmas party.”

  “God, yes. You’re the investigator, the one who supplied the recipe for that sneaky bourbon punch that got us all so drunk.”

  “Guilty.”

  “Wait a second, I’ll buzz you in. I’m in the main building-the big one at the end of the path. The door’s open, just let yourself in.”

  The buzzer sounded momentarily, and I pushed the gate. It swung open onto a wide flagstone path that was flanked by eucalypti. The trees’ bark was peeling in great ragged, curled strips; their leaves shimmered silver when rustled by the light breeze. I couldn’t believe how quiet and otherworldly it was on this side of the wall.

  I followed the path around its curve. Ahead of me stood the largest castle: a one-story building with towers on either end. From this vantage point it looked less impressive than it did when its turrets were viewed from the street; they were too tall, and the middle section too squat, a little out of proportion. A wooden door with metal studding similar to the gate’s was set in a protruding entry area; I went up to it, knocked, and stepped inside.

  The entryway was slate floored, and from there two steps led down into a living room. I hadn’t envisioned what this castle might look like inside, but had I, this wouldn’t have been it. The room was ultramodern in décor, and an entire wall of glass overlooked the formal garden that separated it from two of the other castles. The furniture was white and tan with accents of bright green, made of metal and glass and leather, with many sharp angles and-to my eyes-outlandish shapes. The carpet was chocolate brown, the kind that shows every speck of dirt. This one was showing it, too: peanut shells littered the floor in front of the couch; ashes formed a blurred semicircle by the fireplace; near one corner was something that looked like sawdust-until I noticed the scratching post. Then I recognized it as catnip and spotted the creature that had been indulging-a fat Siamese curled up in a cat-drunken stupor at the base of the post. The cat was so out of it that it had pushed its muzzle into the deep pile of the carpet; their colors matched perfectly. In the corner behind the post stood a three-foot stack of folded white paper bags. An open one perched atop the others; red lettering on it said, I DID MY SHOPPING AT A NEIGHBORHOOD BUSINESS!

  “Sharon, it’s good to see you again!”

  It was Vicky Cushman’s voice, coming from an archway next to the fireplace. I turned and received yet another surprise.

  Vicky no longer looked the cute cheerleader. Her waist-length blond hair had been cropped and permed, but it was a bad perm-too limp and long-and it looked like it hadn’t been washed recently. She’d lost weight, too, and it made her bony, her face too drawn. She wore a cotton dress in a dusty rose color; its bodice was held together with a safety pin in place of the top button, and it showed various unidentifiable stains. The dress’s hem was ripped out in the rear, so it hung almost to her bare heels. Vicky’s voice, however, was as buoyant and warm as I remembered it. I supposed I’d just caught her at a bad time.

  I said, “It’s good to see you, too. But I shouldn’t have dropped by without calling.”

  “Nonsense.” She went to the couch, which was buried in a drift of newspapers, pushed them to the floor on top of the peanut shells, and motioned for me to sit. “It’s a mess, I know it is, but I’ve got a heavy schedule, and the goddamned maid didn’t show, and the kids are just back from my mom’s-listen, do you want a drink? Or a joint? Which is it you do-alcohol or dope? Oh yes, I remember-you made the punch.”

  I assumed she was babbling because she was embarrassed at being caught in such a state. I said, “Actually, I didn’t make it. I gave the recipe to Hank Zahn, and he doubled all the dangerous ingredients. But if you have some white wine, I’d love a glass.”

  “Me too. I’ve been on the phone all day. We’re organizing, you probably read it in the Chron. UC has got to be stopped, they’re eating this neighborhood alive. And then I’m in on the deal about the way they’re managing the project where Poly High School used to be, as well as the fight against the chain stores.” She waved her hand at the stack of red and white shopping bags. “They’re our latest gimmick, just came from the printer today. The local merchants will be giving them out. I’ll get our drinks, be right back. Just relax, enjoy.”

  She disappeared through the archway from which she’d entered. Looking over there, I guessed from the tile floor that it was the kitchen. When I glanced at the fireplace across from me, the assumption proved correct: it was one of those two-sided hearths, opening into both rooms, and behind it I glimpsed part of a dining table and chairs.

  I looked around me. In spite of its untidiness, this was a beautiful room. What would it be like, I wondered, to own such a space? How would it feel to be Vicky-a woman who didn’t have to go out to a job, with a maid who cam in (usually) to vacuum up the peanut shells and catnip? A woman who was supported by a successful husband and was able to indulge in whatever causes interested her?


  My speculations were more curious than envious. Vicky’s life-style was one I had little experience with and didn’t particularly aspire to.

  I also wasn’t too sure what I thought of Vicky’s brand of activism, which had received both good and bad press in recent years. Opponents had labeled it “NIMBYism”-an acronym for the phrase “not in my back yard.” They claimed that NIMBYS displayed the ultimate in selfishness by lobbying-with such bodies as the Board of Permit Appeals and the Planning Commission-for rulings that made their neighborhoods financially off limits to those of lower economic brackets. They suspected a prime motivation behind such activism was the preservation of homeowners’ property values. Certainly some attempts were blatant elitism-such as a recent referendum to block a low-cost-housing project for senior and handicapped citizens, because it would interfere with the neighbors’ exclusive bay views.

  On the other hand, neighborhood activists were avowedly on the side of a high quality of life. They were concerned with overcrowding, lack of parking spaces, preserving open space, and the ecological balance. They were against neighborhood merchants being forced out of business by big chains, and affordable housing being gobbled up by monster corporations or developers. And they were articulate, often vociferous, and seemed to turn up everywhere these days.

  Now-as Vicky rattled around in the kitchen-I decided if she asked me, I would have to say I found myself sympathizing with the NIMBYS. As a homeowner, my little earthquake cottage was my only substantial asset, and when you’re spending close to thirty percent of your gross income on mortgage payments, you don’t want anything going on in your neighborhood that will devalue that asset, or make it not such a good place to live.

  Still, I was uncomfortable enough with NIMBYism to have wriggled my way out of attending a block organizing meeting the week before. But that was true to form: in the sixties I’d done a lot of talking against the Vietnam War but very little protesting. Now I was merely hoping somebody else would protect my property values for me. I wasn’t proud of myself in either instance, but I was self-aware enough to have little real hope of change.