Labyrinth

TEN

Edgewood Avenue, off Parnassus near the University of California Medical Center, was a hillside street so steep you had to park perpendicular to the curb. I squeezed my car into a slot a third of the way up, directly in front of the address I had found in the telephone book. The building was an old Eastlake Victorian that had long ago been cut up into apartments; but its facade had undergone a recent facelift and its gables and columns and porch pediments were painted in bright colors-orange and blue, mostly-like a lot of refurbished Victorians in the city these days.

I went up past a couple of Japanese elms to the front porch. On the row of four mailboxes there I found C. Webster-L. Madden listed for Number Three; I pushed the intercom button above the box. There was no response at first and I thought that maybe she was not home after all; when I’d dialed her number from the pay phone I had gotten a busy signal and taken that to mean she was in. But then the speaker unit made a staticky noise and a woman’s voice said, “Yes? Who is it?”

I told her who it was and why I was there. Silence for a few seconds; then the voice asked, “You’re the detective the police told me about? The one whose card Chris had?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

The electronic lock on the door began to buzz. I got over there and inside and climbed an old-fashioned staircase to the second floor. The door with the numeral three on it was closed; but as soon as I knocked it edged partway open on a chain. Half of a pale face appeared in the opening.

“May I see some identification?”

“Sure.” I got my wallet out and held the photostat of my license up for her to look at.

When she finished examining it she closed the door long enough to take the chain off and then pulled it wide. She was a pretty girl about Christine’s age, with long straight black hair and huge sad colt-brown eyes; the pale skin had a translucent quality, etched now with lines and shadows. She was wearing what may or may not have been mourning clothes: black slacks and a black pullover sweater.

“I’m sorry if I seemed suspicious,” she said. “It’s just that what happened to Chris has made me a little paranoid.”

“I understand,” I said.

She stood aside and let me come in. The living room was good-sized, furnished with inexpensive items made of blonde wood and upholstered in bright patterns, decorated in a way that was feminine without being girlish. Impressionistic oil paintings hung on three of the walls, and there were a lot of colored glass mobiles suspended from the ceiling. On one end table was an enormous white paper rose in a pewter vase.

Lainey sat on the couch, drawing her knees up under her; I took one of the chairs. “I know this must be a difficult time for you,” I said tentatively. “I won’t keep you long.”

“It’s all right. I want to do everything I can. Are you working with the police?”

“No. For Martin Talbot’s sister.”

“Oh-yes. I read about Jerry’s father in the papers this morning; it was a shock all over again. It’s all so… frightening.”

I had no words for that; I just nodded.

“Poor Jerry,” she said. “First Chris being killed and then his father…” She shivered and was silent.

“Do you know Jerry well?” I asked.

“Pretty well. I met him when Chris started going with him about six months ago.”

“How did they meet?”

“A friend of Jerry’s introduced them at State.”

“Could you tell me the friend’s name?”

“Dave Brodnax.”

“How would I get in touch with him, do you know?”

“Well, I don’t know where he lives, but he’s still going to State. And he’s on the football team.”

“What about Jerry’s other friends? Do you know any of them?”

“The only one I’ve met is Steve Farmer,” Lainey said. “He used to go to State too, but he’s been working in Bodega Bay for almost a year. He’s the one who got Jerry his job up there.”

“When did you last see Jerry?”

“Two weeks ago. He came down on the weekend to see Chris.”

“Did he usually come down on weekends to see her?”

“Yes. Except for this past one.”

“Why didn’t he come then?”

“He told Chris he had some important work to do.”

“Did he say what it was?”

“No. Just that it was something he was writing.”

“Writing? You mean creatively?”

“I guess so. He wants to be a journalist; maybe it was an article or something. He did one once on salmon fishing and sold it to the Examiner for their Sunday magazine.”

“Did he give any indication that he might be planning to leave Bodega Bay on Sunday night?”

“Chris didn’t tell me if he did.”

“And you don’t have any idea why he disappeared or where he might have gone?”

“No, none. That’s part of what makes everything so confusing-Jerry disappearing like that, for no reason…”

I asked, “Did Jerry know Christine was going to have a baby?”

It was five or six seconds before she answered that. Wetness glistened in her eyes, as if she were thinking of the death not only of her friend but of Christine’s unborn child; she swallowed a couple of times. “Yes,” she said. “Chris told both of us when Jerry was here that last time.”

“While all three of you were together?”

“No, separately. But I know she told him because she said so.”

“What was his reaction?”

“Well, neither of them wanted to have a baby right away. But Chris wanted it and so did Jerry. They weren’t going to, you know, have an abortion.”

This line of questioning was not getting me anywhere. And it was making me feel awkward and uncomfortable because of the tears it had put in Lainey’s eyes. I went on to something else.

“Did you know Jerry’s father?”

“No, I never met him.”

“Had Christine met him?”

“Yes. A couple of times.”

“Did they get along?”

“I think so. Chris said he drank a lot, but she seemed to like him anyway.”

“Did Jerry ever talk about him?”

“Talk about him?”

“What kind of relationship they had, like that?”

“Not that I can remember,” Lainey said. A pair of angular creases like an inverted V formed above the bridge of her nose. “Do you think there’s some sort of connection between Chris’ murder and Mr. Carding’s? Is that why you’re asking about him?”

“It’s possible, yes.”

“But I thought Martin Talbot killed Jerry’s father. I mean, the papers said he confessed… ”

“He did confess,” I said, “but he wasn’t telling the truth. He’s a sick man. But he’s not a murderer.”

The frown creases deepened. “You can’t believe Jerry did it? Not just to Chris but his own father? That’s crazy. He’d have to be some kind of monster and he’s not, he’s just not.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said. Which was not the whole truth-I didn’t disbelieve it yet, either-but it was what she wanted to hear. “Still, it’s a fact that both his fiancee and his father were murdered within two days of each other. And that he’s disappeared. ”

She shook her head in a numb way and hugged herself, as though she felt chilled.

I asked gently, “Had you ever heard of Martin Talbot before you read his name in the papers this morning?”

“No. Never.”

“Do the names Laura Nichols or Karen Nichols mean anything to you?”

“Nichols? No, nothing.” Another headshake. “I just can’t understand any of this. It seemed so obvious who’d killed Chris, and now… ”

“Obvious who’d killed hear?”

“Yes. She’d been getting threatening calls and letters for more than two weeks. Did you know about that?”

I nodded.

“Well, I thought it was him, the motherfucker.”

The last word made me blink. I had more or less grown used to hearing women young and old use street language, the way a lot of them did these days, but the expletive was jarring and a little incongruous coming out of Lainey Madden. I wondered if she even realized she’d said it, as confused and angry and wrought up as she was.

“Maybe it was,” I said. “What can you tell me about the threats?”

“Not very much. Chris couldn’t imagine who was making them and neither could I. We thought it was one of those, you know, creeps who get their kicks from scaring women.”

“It was a man who made the calls?”

“I think so. I listened in once on the bedroom extension; the voice was sort of muffled, but it sounded like a man.”

“What did he say?”

“Just a lot of crazy stuff about getting Chris, making her pay for what she’d done to him. He never said what it was supposed to be that she’d done.”

“The letters said the same kind of thing?”

“Pretty much. Do you want to see one of them?”

“You still have one? I understood you’d given them all to the police.”

“I thought I had,” she said. “But I found one I’d overlooked after they were gone. It’s just like the others.”

Lainey stood and disappeared through a doorway on the far side of the room. Half a minute later she came back and handed me a single sheet of inexpensive white paper business-folded into thirds.

I unfolded it. Typed in its approximate center was a sort of salutation and four short sentences; no signature of any kind. The typeface was pica and I could tell from the look of it that it belonged to a machine with a standard ribbon, rather than one of those newer carbon jobs. I could also tell that the typewriter was probably an older model: the “a” was tilted at a drunken angle and the upper curve of the “r” was chipped off at the top.

It read:

Ms. Christine Webster,

You are going to pay for what you did. One way or another, I promise you that. You bitch, I’ll hurt you worse than you hurt me. I’ll HURT you.

Creepy stuff, all right. The product of a sick mind. I refolded it and put it down on the coffee table. Lainey left it where it lay; she seemed not to want to touch it any more.

I said, “How many of these were there?”

“Six. They came about every other day.”

“Where were they postmarked?”

“Here in the city.”

“Did Christine contact the police about them?”

“Yes. But they said there wasn’t anything they could do because he hadn’t tried to do anything to her. Well, maybe he did do something to her,” she said bitterly. “And now it’s too late.”

“Did she tell Jerry about the threats?”

“No. He would have quit his job and come down here to be with her, and she didn’t want that; he couldn’t be with her twenty-four hours a day. But she was going to tell him if they kept on much longer.”

“You told the police she was thinking about seeing a private detective,” I said. “When did she decide that?”

“Last week.”

“Was my name mentioned at all?”

“No. And I don’t know where she got your business card; I didn’t even know she had it until the policemen asked me about it.”

“Do you have any idea why she didn’t get in touch with me?”

“I guess because she hadn’t made up her mind yet. I told her seeing a detective was a good idea, but she thought it would cost too much; she didn’t have much money.”

It wouldn’t have mattered to me, I thought. I would have tried to help if she’d come to me; I take jobs for the money but I don’t turn them down, not this kind, because of a lack of it. God, why didn’t she come to me?

Useless thinking again. I pushed the thoughts away and asked Lainey, “You’re sure Christine had no personal enemies? Old boyfriends she’d broken up with, men she’d turned down, people she might have offended in some way?”

“I’m as sure as Chris was. Do you think her killer is someone she knew?”

“Yes,” I said. “Unless she’d have gone out to Lake Merced at night to meet a stranger.”

“I guess she probably wouldn’t have. But she was a pretty trusting person, you know. And a kind person, too.” Lainey shook her head. “She never hurt anybody, that’s the thing. Oh, she was forever trying to tell people how to run their lives-but in a nice way, just trying to help them. She never hurt anybody.”

“Had anything unusual happened to her recently, before the threats started? Anything she might have done or been involved in?”

Lainey gave that some thought. “No, I’m sure there wasn’t,” she said at length. “A girl she knew did commit suicide a little over a month ago, but that didn’t have anything to do with Chris.”

Suicide again. “What girl was that?”

“Her name was Bobbie Reid. She worked in the same building Chris did downtown-Chris had a part-time job with the Kittredge Advertising Agency-and they got to know each other.”

“Were they close friends?”

“No. Chris didn’t see her socially as far as I know.”

“Why did Bobbie take her own life?”

“Chris said she was depressed about some sort of personal problem. One night she just swallowed a whole bottle of sleeping pills.”

“Did Chris know what this personal problem was?”

“I think she did, but she didn’t want to talk about it. She said Bobbie was dead and there was no use talking about the dead-” Lainey winced: Here we were talking about Christine and Christine herself was dead. “She could be kind of close-mouthed at times. Like she didn’t tell me or Jerry she was pregnant until after she’d known it herself for weeks.”

“Do you have any idea who Bobbie worked for?”

“No. The Kittredge Agency is in a big building in the Financial District and it must have at least a hundred offices in it.”

“Is there anything else you can tell me about her?”

“That’s all I know. Is it really important? I just don’t see how her suicide could be connected with Chris’ murder.”

“Neither do I,” I said. “But it’s something that ought to be checked out, just in case. Did you tell the police about Bobbie Reid?”

“No, I don’t think I did. It didn’t occur to me then; I was pretty upset.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

She nodded. And from outside, in the direction of the Medical Center, there was the faint shriek of a siren. Lainey cocked her head, listening to it-and shivered and hugged herself again. “Is it cold in here?” she said. “It feels cold.”

“A little,” I said, even though it wasn’t. “I think I’d better be going. I don’t have any more questions.”

“All right. Will you let me know if you find out anything?”

“Of course.”

“I won’t be home for the weekend, though. I’m flying down to San Diego tonight. That’s where Chris’ parents live, you see, and the funeral is tomorrow.” She wrapped her arms more tightly around herself. “I hope a lot of people come,” she said. “Chris liked people.”

The siren kept on wailing in the distance, like a discordant note in a dirge.

Or the scream of a young girl dying.