McCone And Friends

UP AT THE RIVERSIDE

“Duck if you see a cop, Ted.”

And so we were off on our mission: my boss, Sharon McCone; my partner, Neal Osborn; and me, Ted Smalley. She, the issuer of my orders, drove her venerable MG convertible. He sat slouched and rumpled beside her. I was perched on the backseat, if you could call it that, which you really can’t because it’s nothing more than a shelf for carrying one’s groceries and such. And illegal for passengers, which is why I had to keep a keen eye out for the law.

I think our minor vehicular transgression made Shar feel free-far away from her everyday concerns about clients and caseloads at the investigative agency she owns. I knew our excursion was taking Neal’s mind off the rising rent and declining profits of his used bookstore. And even though I entertained an image of myself as a sack from Safeway, my thinning hair ruffling like the leaves of a protruding bunch of celery, I still felt like a kid cutting school. A kid who had freed himself from billing and correspondence, to say nothing of keeping five private investigators and the next-door law firm in number-two pencils and scratch pads.

Soon we were across the Golden Gate Bridge and speeding north on Highway 101. It was a summer Friday and traffic was heavy, but Shar made the MG zip from lane to lane and we outdistanced them all. Our mission was a pleasurable one: a stop along the Russian River to look at and perhaps purchase the jukebox of Neal’s and my dreams, than a picnic on the beach at Jenner.

Our plans had been formulated that morning when Shar called us at the ungodly hour of six, all excited. “One of those jukeboxes you guys want is advertised in today’s classified,” she said. “Seeburg Trashcan, and you won’t believe this: It’s almost within your price range.”

While I primed my brain into running order, Neal went to fetch our copy of the paper. “Phone number’s in the 707 area code,” he said into the downstairs extension. “Sonoma County.”

“Nice up there,” Shar said wistfully.

“Maybe Ted and I can take a drive on Sunday, check it out.”

I issued a Neanderthal grunt of agreement. Till I have at least two cups of coffee, I’m not verbal. “I’ve a feeling somebody’ll snap it up before then,” she said.

“Well, if you’ll give Ted part of the day off, I can ask my assistant to mind the store.”

“I…oh, hell, why don’t the three of us take the whole day off? I’ll pack a picnic. You know the sourdough loaf I make, with all the melted cheese and stuff?”

“Say no more.”

Shar exited the freeway at River Road and we sped through vineyards toward the redwood forest. When we rolled into the town of Guerneville, its main street mirrored our holiday spirits. People roamed the sidewalks in shorts and t-shirts, many eating ice cream cones or by-the-slice pizza; a flea market in the parking lot of a supermarket was doing a brisk business; rainbow flags flapped in the breeze outside gay-owned business.

The town has been the hub of the resort area for generations; rustic cabins and summer homes line the riverbank and back up onto the hillsides. In the seventies it became a vacation-time mecca for gays, and the same wide-open atmosphere as in San Francisco’s Castro district prevailed, but by the late eighties the AIDS epidemic, a staffing economy, and a succession of disastrous floods had taken away the magic. Now it appeared that Guerneville was bouncing back as an eclectic and bohemian community of hardy folk who are willing to yearly risk cresting flood waters and mud slides. I, the grocery sack, smiled benevolently as we cruised along.

Outside of town the road wound high above the slow-moving river. At the hamlet of Monte Rio, we crossed the bridge and turned down a narrow lane made narrower by encroaching redwoods and vehicles pulled close to the walls of the mainly shabby houses. Neal began squinting at the numbers. “Dammit, why don’t they make them bigger?” he muttered.

I refrained from reminding him that he was overdue for his annual checkup at the optometrist’s.

Shar was the one who spotted the place: a large sagging three-story dirty-white clapboard structure with a parking area out front. The roof was missing a fair number of its shingles, the windows were hopelessly crusted with grime, and one column of the wide front porch leaned alarmingly. On the porch, to each side of the double front door, sat identical green wicker rockers, and in each sat a scowly-looking man. Between them, extending from the door and down the steps, was a series of orange cones such as highway department crews use. A yellow plastic tape strung from cone to cone bore the words DANGER DO NOT CROSS DANGER DO NOT CROSS DANGER DO NOT CROSS…

In as reverent a tone as I’d ever heard him use, Neal said, “Good God, it’s the old Riverside Hotel!”

While staring at it Shar had overshot the parking area. As she drove along looking for a place to turn around she asked, “You know this place?”

“From years ago. Was built as a fancy resort in the twenties. People would come up from the city and spend their entire vacations here. Then in the seventies the original owner’s family sold it to a guy named Tom Atwater, who turned it into a gay hotel. Great restaurant and bar, cottages with individual hot tubs scattered on the grounds leading down to the beach, anything-goes atmosphere.”

“You stayed there?” I asked.

Neal heard the edge in my voice. He turned his head and smiled at me, laugh lines around his eyes crinkling. It amuses and flatters him that I’m jealous of his past. “I had dinner there. Twice.”

Shar turned the MG in a driveway and we coasted back toward the hotel. The men were watching us. Both were probably in their mid fifties, dressed in shorts and t-shirts, but otherwise-except for the scowls-they were total opposites. The one on our left was a scarecrow with a shock of long gray-blond hair; the one our right reminded me of Elmer Fudd, and had just as bald a pate.

When we climbed out of the car-the grocery sack needing a firm tug-Neal called, “I phoned earlier about the jukebox.”

The scarecrow jerked his thumb at Fudd and kept scowling. Fudd arranged his face into more pleasant lines and got up from the rocker.

“I’m Chris Fowler,” he said. “You Neal and Ted?”

“I’m Neal, this is Ted, and that’s Sharon.”

“Come on in, I’ll show you the box.”

“’Come on in, I’ll show you the box’” the scarecrow mimicked in a high nasal whine.

“Jesus!” Chris Fowler exclaimed. He led us through his side of the double front door.

Inside was a reception area that must’ve been magnificent before the oriental carpets faded and the flocked wallpaper became water stained and peeling. In its center stood a mahogany desk backed by an old fashioned pigeonhole arrangement, and wide stairs on either side led up to the second story. The yellow tape continued, from the door to the pigeonhole arrangement, neatly bisecting the room.

Shar stopped and stared at it, frowning. I tugged her arm and shook my head. Sometimes the woman can be so rude. Chris Fowler didn’t notice though, just turned right in to a dimly lighted barroom. “There’s your jukebox,” he said.

A thing of beauty, it was. Granted, a particular acquired-taste kind of beauty – shaped like an enormous trash can of fake blond wood, with two flaring red plastic side panels and a gaudy gilt grille studded with plastic gems. Tiny mirrored squares surrounded the grille, and the whole thing was decked out with enough chrome as a 1950’s Cadillac. I went up to it and touched the coin slot. Five plays for a quarter, two for a dime, one for a nickel. Those were the days.

Instantly I fell in love.

When I looked at Neal, his eyes were sparkling. “Can we play it?” he asked Chris.

“Sure.” He took a nickel from his pocket and dropped it into the slot. Whirrs, clicks, and then mellow tones crooned, “See the pyramids across the Nile…”

Shar shook her head, rolled her eyes, and wandered off to inspect a pinball machine. She despairs of Neal’s and my campy tendencies.

“So what d’you think?” Chris asked.

I said, “Good sound tone.”

Neal said, “The price is kind of steep for us, though.”

Chris said, “I’ll throw in a box of extra 78’s.”

Neal said, “I don’t know…”

And then Shar wandered back over. “What’s with the tape?” she asked Chris. “And what’s with the guy on the other side of it?”

Neal looked as if he wanted to strangle her. I stifled a moan. A model of subtlety, Shar, and right when we were trying to strike a deal.

Chris grimaces. “That’s my partner of many years, Ira Sloan. We’ve agreed to disagree. The tape’s my way of indicating my displeasure with him.”

“Disagree over what?”

“This hotel. We jointly inherited it six months ago from Tom Atwater. Did either of you guys know him?”

I shook my head, but Neal nodded. He said, “I met him.” Grinned at me and added, “Twice.”

“Well,” Chris said, “Tom was an old friend. In fact, he introduced Ira and me, nearly twenty years ago. When he left the place to us we said, ‘What a great way to get out of the city, have our own business in an area that’s experiencing a renaissance.’ So we sold our city house, moved up here, called in the contractors, and got estimates of what it would take to go upscale and reopen. The building’s run down, but the construction’s solid. All it needs outside is a new roof and paint job. The cottages were swept away in the floods, but eventually they can be rebuilt. Inside here, all it would take is redecorating, a new chimney and fireplace in the common room on the other side, and updated kitchen equipment. So then what does my partner decide to do?”

All three of us shook our heads, caught up in his breathless monologue.

“My loving partner decides we’re to do nothing. Even though we’ve got more than enough money to fix the place up, he wants to leave it as is and live out our golden years here in Faulkneresque splendor and while it falls down around us!”

Neal and I looked properly horrified, but Shar asked, “So why’d you put up the tape?” maybe a single-minded focus is an asset in a private investigator, but it seems to me it plays hell with interpersonal relations.

Chris wanted to talk about the tape, however. “Ira and I divided the place, straight down the middle. He took the common room, utility room, and the area on the floors above it. I took the restaurant, kitchen, bar and above. I prepare the meals and slip his under the tape on the reception desk. He washes our clothes and pushes mine over here to me. I’ll tell you, it’s quite a life!”

“And in the meantime, you’re selling off the fixtures in your half?”

“Only the ones that won’t fit the image I want to create here.”

“How can you create it in half a hotel?”

“I can’t, but I’m hoping Ira’ll come around eventually. I wish I knew why he has this tic about keeping the place the way it is. If I did, I know I could talk him out of the notion.”

Shar was looking thoughtful now. She walked around the jukebox, examining its lovely lines and gnawing at her lower lip. She peered through the glass at the turntable where the 78 of “You Belong to Me” now rested silently. She glanced through the archway at the yellow plastic tape.

“Chris,” she said, “what would it be worth to you to find out what Ira’s problem is?”

“A lot.”

“A reduction of price on this jukebox to one my friends can afford?”

I couldn’t believe it! Yes, she was offering out of the goodness of her heart, because she’d seen how badly Neal and I wanted the jukebox, and she knew the limits of our budget. But she was also doing it because she never can resist a chance to play detective.

Chris looked surprised, then grinned. “A big reduction, but I don’t see how-”

She took one of her business cards from her purse and handed it to him. Said to me, “Come on, Watson. The game’s afoot.”

“Mr. Sloan?” Shar was standing at the tape on the porch. I was trying to hide behind her.

Ira Sloan’s eyes flicked toward us, than straight ahead.

“Oh, Mr. Sloan!” now she was waving, for heaven’s sake, as if he wasn’t sitting a mere five feet away!

His scowl deepened.

Shar stepped over the tape. “Mr. Sloan, d’you suppose you could give Ted and me a tour of your side of the hotel? We love old places like this, and we both think it’s a shame your partner wants to spoil it.”

He turned his head, looking skeptical but not as ferocious.

Shar reached back and yanked on my arm so hard that I almost tripped over the tape. “Ted’s partner, Neal, is in there with Chris, talking upscale. I had to remove Ted before they end up with a tape down the middle of their apartment.”

Ira Sloan ran his hand through his longish hair and stood up. He was very tall-at least six-four and so skinny he seemed to have no ass at all. Had he always been so thin, or was it the result of too many cooling meals shoved across the reception desk?

He said, “The tape was his idea.”

“So he told us.”

“Thinks it’s funny.”

“It’s not.”

“I like people who appreciate old things. It’ll be a pleasure to show you around.”

The common room was full of big maple furniture with wide wooden arms and thick floral chintz-covered cushions, faded now. The chairs and sofas would’ve been fashionable in the thirties and forties, campy in the seventies. Now they just looked tired. Casement windows overlooked the lawn and the river, and on the far side of the room was a deep stone fireplace whose chimney showed chinks where the mortar had crumbled. Against the stones hung an oval stained-glass panel in muddy looking colors. It reminded me of the stone in one of those mood rings that were popular in the seventies.

By the time we’d inspected the room, Shar and Ira Sloan were chattering up a storm. By the time we got upstairs to the guestrooms, they were old friends.

The guestrooms were furnished with waterbeds, another icon of the sybaritic decade. Now their mattresses were shriveled like used condoms. The suites had Jacuzzi tubs set before the windows, once brightly colored porcelain, but now rust-stained and grimy. The balconies off the third-story rooms were narrow and cobwebby, and the webbing on their lounge chairs had been stripped away, probably by nesting birds.

Shar asked, “How long was the hotel in operation?”

“Tom closed it in ‘eighty-three.”

“Why?”

“Declining business. By then…well, a lot of things were over.”

It made me so sad. The Riverside Hotel’s brief time in the sun had been a wild, tumultuous, drug-hazed era-but also curiously innocent. A time of experimentation and new found freedom. A time to adopt new lifestyles without fear of reprisal. But now the age of innocence was over, harsh reality had set in. Many of the men who had stayed here were dead, many others decaying like this structure.

Why would Ira Sloan want to keep intact his monument to the death of happiness?

Back downstairs Shar whispered to me, “Stay here. Talk with him.” Then she was gone into the reception room and over the tape.

I turned trying to think of something to say to Ira Sloan, but he’d vanished into some dark corner of the haunted place. Possibly to commune with his favorite ghost. I sat down on one of the chairs amid a cloud of rising dust to see if he’d return. Against the chimney the stained-glass mood-ring stone seemed to have darkened. My mood darkened with it. I wanted out of this place and into the sun.

In about ten minutes Ira Sloan still hadn’t reappeared. I heard a rustling behind the reception desk. Shar-who else? She was removing a ledger from a drawer under the warning tape and spreading it open.

“Well, that’s interesting.” She muttered after a couple of minutes. “Very interesting.”

A little while more and she shut the ledger and stuffed it into her tote bag. Smiled at me and said, “Let’s go now. You look as though you can use some of my famous sourdough loaf and a walk by the sea.”

When we were ensconced on the sand with our repast spread before us, I asked Shar, “What’d you take from the desk?”

“The guest register.” She pulled it from her tote and handed it to me.

“You stole it?”

Her mouth twitched-a warning sign. “Borrowed it, with Chris’ permission.”

“Why?”

“Well, then I went back to talk with him some more, I asked how the two of them decided who got what. He said Ira insisted on his side of the hotel, and Chris was glad to divide it that way because he likes to cook.”

Neal poured wine into plastic glasses and handed them around. “Bizarre arrangement, if you ask me.”

Shar was cutting the sourdough loaf, in imminent danger of sawing off a finger as well. I took the knife from her and performed culinary surgery.

“Anyway,” she went on, ‘then I asked Chris if Ira had insisted on getting anything else. He said only the guest register. But by then Chris’d gotten his back up, and he pointed out that the ledger was kept in a drawer of the desk that’s bisected by the tape. So they agreed to leave it there and hold it in common. Ira wasn’t happy with the arrangement.”

I filled paper plates with slices of the loaf. Its delicious aroma was quickly dispelling my hotel-inducted funk.

“And did the register tell you anything?” Neal asked. “Only that somebody-I assume Ira-tore the page out for the week of August 13, 1978. Recently.”

“How d’you know it was recent?”

“Fresh tears look different than old ones. The edges of these aren’t browning.” She flipped the book open to where the pages were missing.

“So now what?”

“I try to find out who was there and what happened that week. Maybe someone well known who was still in the closet stayed there. Or somebody who was with a jealous person he wasn’t supposed to be.”

She stabbed her finger at the first column on the ledger page, then at the last. “Date checked in, date checked out. Five individuals who checked in before the thirteenth checked out on the eighteenth. My job for this weekend it to try to locate and talk with them.”

“Hey, Ted, come along with me!”

Shar was in the driver’s seat of the agency van parked on the floor of Pier 24 ½, where we have our offices. I was dragging tail down the iron stairway from the second level, intent on heading home after a perfectly outlandish Monday. I went over to the van and leaned in the open window. “What’s happening?”

“With any luck, you and I are going to collect your jukebox this evening and have it back at your place by the time Neal closes the store.” Anachronism, Neal’s used bookstore, is open till nine on Mondays.

I jumped into the van, the day’s horrors forgotten. “You find out what Ira Sloan’s problem is?”

“Some of it. The rest is about to unfold.”

I got my seatbelt on just as she swerved into traffic on the waterfront boulevard outside the pier. Thanked God I was firmly strapped in, a grocery sack no longer.

The house was on a quiet street on the west side of Petaluma, a small city some forty minutes north of the Golden Gate. It used to be called the Egg Basket of the World, before the chicken boom went bust. From what I hear lately, it’s turning into Yuppie Heaven.

As we got out of the van I looked up at the gray Victorian. It had a wide porch, high windows, and a fan-like pediment over the door that was painted in the colors of the rainbow. This, Shar had told me, was the home of Mark Curry, one of the men who had stayed at the Riverside during the second week of August, 1978. Surprisingly, given the passage of time, she’d managed to locate three of the five who’d signed the register before the missing week, and to interview two so far.

“Ted,” she said, “how long have gays been doing that rainbow thing?”

“You mean the flags and all? Funny-since 1978. The first rainbow flag was designed by a San Francisco artist, Gilbert Baker, as a sign of the gay community’s solidarity. A version of it was flown in the next year’s Pride Parade.”

“I didn’t realize it went back that far.” She started up the walk, and I followed.

The man who answered the door was slender and handsome, with a fine-boned face and a diamond stud in one nostril, and a full head of wavy gray hair that threatened to turn me green with envy. His wood-paneled parlor made me envision too: full of Chippendale furniture, with a gilt harp in the front window. Mark Curry seated us there, offered coffee, and went to fetch it.

Shar saw the way I was looking at the room. “It’s not you,” she said. “In a room like this that jukebox would look-”

“Like a wart on the face of an angel. But in our place-”

“It’ll still look like a trashcan.”

Mark Curry came back with a silver coffee service, and got down to business while he poured. “After you phoned. Ms McCone, I got in touch with Chris Fowler. He’s an old friend, from the time we worked as volunteers at an AIDS hospice. He vouched for you, so I dug out my journal for 1978 and refreshed my memory about August’s stay at the Riverside.”

“You arrived there August eleventh?”

“Yes.”

“Alone?”

“No, with my then partner, Dave Howell. He’s been dead…do you believe nearly sixteen years now?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks. Sometimes it seems like yesterday.”

“Were you and Mr. Howell staying in a cottage or the main building?”

“Main building, third floor, river side. Over the bar.”

“D’you recall who else was there?”

“Well, the place was always full in the summertime, and a lot of the men I didn’t know. And even more people came in over the weekend. There was to be a canoeing regatta on Wednesday the sixteenth, with a big barbecue on the beach that evening, and they were gearing up for it.”

I said, “Canoeing regatta?”

Mark Curry winked at me. “A bunch of guys, stoned and silly, banging into each other and capsizing and having a great time of it.”

“Sounds like fun.”

Shar said, “So who do you remember?”

“Well, Tom Atwater, of course. His lover, Bobby Gardena, showed up on Tuesday. Bobby had a house in the city, divided his time between there and the river. Ira Sloan, one of Tom’s best friends, and the guy who inherited that white elephant along with Chris. He was alone, had just broken off a relationship, and seemed pretty unhappy, but a few months later Tom introduced him to Chris, and they’ve been together ever since. Then there was Sandy Janssen. Darryl Williams. And of course there was…”

Shar dutifully noted the names, but I sensed she’d lost interest in them. No well known who customarily hid in the closet, no scandalous mispairing. When Mark Curry ran out of people, she said, “Tell me about the week of the thirteenth. Did anything out of the ordinary happen?”

Mark Curry laughed. “Out of the ordinary was de rigeur at the Riverside.”

“More out of the ordinary than usual.”

Her serious-and curiously intense-tone sobered him. He stared into his coffee cup, recapturing his memories. When he spoke, his voice was subdued.

“The night of the regatta, you know? Everybody was on the beach, carrying on till all hours. A little before two Dave and I decided we wanted to have a couple of quiet drinks alone, so we slipped away from the party. I remember walking up the slope from the beach and across the lawn to the hotel. Everything was so quiet. I suppose it was just the contrast to the commotion on the beach, but it gave me the shivers. Dave, too. And when we went inside, it was still quiet, but…”

“But what, Mr. Curry?”

“There was a…an undercurrent. A sense of whispers and footfalls, but you couldn’t really identify whose or where they were. Like something was going on, but not really. You know how that can be?”

Shar’s face was thoughtful. She’s had a lot of unusual experiences in her life, and I was sure she did know how that could be.

Mark Curry added, “Dave and I went into the bar and sat down. Nobody came. We were about to make our own drinks-you could do that, so long as signed a chit-when Ira Sloan stepped out of the kitchen and told us the bar was closed.”

“But this was after legal closing time.”

He shook his head. “The bar at the Riverside never closed. It was immune from the dictates of the state lawmakers-some of whom were its frequent patrons.”

“I see. Did Ira give you any explanation?”

“No. He asked if we wanted to buy a bottle, so we did, and took it up to our room and consumed it on our balcony. And all night the noisy party on the beach went on. But the quiet in the hotel was louder than any cacophony I’ve ever experienced.”

When we got back to the van, Shar took out her phone and made a call. “Hi, Mick,” she said.

“Anything?”

Mick Savage, her nephew, computer specialist, and fastest skip tracer in the west.

“I see…Uh-huh…Right…No evidence about a gas leak on Friday the eighteenth?…Yes, I thought as much…No, nothing else. And thanks.”

She broke the conversation, stuffed the phone back into her bag, and looked at me. Her expression was profoundly sad.

“You’ve got yourself a jukebox,” she said.

“Before I got into this,” Shar said to Chris Fowler, “There’s something I ought to say.”

The three of us were seated at a table in the bar at the Riverside. The dim lighting made Chris look curiously young and hopeful.

“Secrets,” Shar went on, “are not necessarily harmful, so long as they remain secrets. But once you put them into words, they can’t be taken back. Ever.”

Chris nodded. “I understand what you’re trying to tell me, but I need to know.”

“All right, then. I spoke with three men who were present at the hotel on Wednesday, August 16, 1978. Each gave me bits and pieces of a story, that led me to suspect what happened. A check I had run on a fourth man pretty much confirmed my suspicions.”

On August sixteenth of that year, a canoeing regatta was held at this hotel-a big yearly event. The cottages and rooms were all full, but we’re only concerned with a few people: Tom Atwater and his lover Bobby Gardena. Ira. And my witnesses: Mark Curry, Darryl Williams, and Sandy Janssen.

“All three witnesses came up here that Friday before the regatta. Ira arrived on Sunday, Bobby Gardena on Tuesday. It soon became apparent to everybody that Tom and Bobby weren’t getting on. Bobby was baiting Tom. They quarreled frequently and publicly. Bobby confided to Sandy Janssen that he’d told Tom he’d quit his job and put his San Francisco house up for sale, with the intention of moving to New Orleans. Tom accused him of being involved with somebody else, and Bobby wouldn’t confirm or deny it. He taunted Tom with the possibility.

“After the regatta there was a barbecue on the beach. Everybody was there except for Tom, Bobby and Ira. Bobby had told Darryl Williams he planned to pack and head back to the city that night. Ira was described by Mark Curry as alone and unhappy.”

I heard a noise in the reception area and looked that way. A thin scarecrow’s shape stood deep in shadow on the other side of the desk. Ira Sloan. I started to say something, then thought, No. Shar and Chris are discussing him. He has a right to hear, doesn’t he?

“Something unusual happened that night,” Shar continued. “Mark Curry noticed it when he returned to the hotel around two. Sandy Janssen described a strange atmosphere that kept him from sleeping well. Darryl Williams talked about hearing whispers in the corridors. The next morning Tom told everybody that Bobby had left early for the city, but Darryl claims he saw Bobby’s car in the lot when he looked out his window around nine. An hour later it was gone. None of my three witnesses ever heard from or saw Bobby again. The skip trace I had run on him turned up nothing. The final closing on the sale of his city house was handled by Tom, who had his power-of-attorney.”

Chris Fowler started to say something, but Shar held up her hand. “And here’s the most telling point: On Thursday night, all the guests received notice that they had to vacate the premises on Friday morning, due to a potentially dangerous gas leak that needed to be worked on. A leak the PG &E has no record of. The only men who remained behind were Tom and Ira.”

Chris sat very still, breathing shallowly. I looked at the reception area. The scarecrow figure in the shadows hadn’t moved.

“I think you can draw your own conclusions,” Shar added. She spoke gently and sadly-not the usual trumpeting and crowing that I hear from her when she solves a case.

Slowly Chris said, “God, I can’t believe Tom killed Bobby! He was a gentle man. I never saw him raise his hand to anybody.”

“It may have been self defense,” Shar said. “Darryl Williams told me one of his friends had an earlier relationship with Bobby, and abusive one. Bobby always threw the first punches.”

“So an argument, a moment of violence…”

“Is all it takes.”

“Naturally he would’ve turned to Ira to help him cover up. They were best friends, had been since grade school. But that doesn’t make Ira a murderer.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Anyway, you can’t prove it.”

“Not without Bobby’s remains-which are probably somewhere in this hotel.”

Chris glanced around, shivering slightly. “And as long as they’re here, Ira and I will be at a stalemate, estranged for the rest of our lives. That’s how long he’ll guard them.”

I was still staring at Ira Sloan’s dark figure, but now I looked beyond it, into the common room. The stained-glass oval hanging on the fireplace chimney, that I’d fancifully thought of as the stone in a mood ring, gleamed in the rays from a nearby floor lamp: pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo. The seven colors of the rainbow.

I said, “I know where Bobby’s buried,”

“When I saw this stained glass yesterday,” I said, “I couldn’t tell the colors, on account of it being hung where no light could pass through. A strange place, and that should’ve told Shar or me something right then. Tonight, with the lamp on, I see that it’s actually the seven colors of the rainbow.”

We-Shar, Chris, and I-were standing in front of the fireplace. I could feel Ira Sloan’s presence in the shadows behind us.

“It’s the only rainbow symbol in the hotel,” I went on, “and it was probably commissioned by Tom Atwater sometime in 1978.”

“Why then?” Shar asked.

“Remember I told you that the first rainbow flag was designed in ’78? And that a version of it that was flown at the parade only had six colors. They dropped indigo so there would be exactly three stripes on either side of the street. That’s the one that’s become popular and is recognized by the International Congress of Flag Makers.”

Chris said, “So Tom and Ira put Bobby’s body someplace temporary the night of the murder-maybe the walk-in freezer-and after Tom closed the hotel, they walled him in behind the fireplace. But Tom was a sentimental guy, and he loved Bobby. He’d’ve wanted some monument.”

Behind us there was a whisper of noise, such as I imagined had filled this hotel the night of August 16, 1978. Shar heard it-I could tell from the way she cocked her head-but Chris didn’t.

Bitterly he said, “It couldn’t’ve been self defense. If it was, Tom or Ira would’ve called the county sheriff.”

“It wasn’t self defense. It was an accident. I was there. I saw it.”

Slowly we turned toward the reception area. Ira Sloan had come out of the shadows and was backed up against the warning tape, his face twisted with despair of one who expects not to be believed.

“Bobby was leaving to go back to the city,” he added. “He was taunting Tom about how he’d be seeing his new lover. They were at the top of the stairs. Tom called Bobby and ugly name, and Bobby went to hit him. Tom ducked, Bobby lost his balance. He fell, rolled over and over, and hit his head on the base of the reception desk.” He motioned at the sharp corner near the stairway.

Shar asked, “Why didn’t you call the sheriff?”

“Tom had been outspoken about gay rights. Outspoken and abrasive. He had enemies on the county board of supervisors and in the sheriff’s department. They’d have seen to it that he was charged with murder. Tom was afraid, so I did what any friend would do.”

Chris said, “For God’s sake, Ira, why didn’t you tell me this when we inherited the hotel?’

“I wanted to preserve Tom’s memory. And I was afraid what you might think of me. What you might do about it.”

His partner was silent for a moment, then he said, “I should’ve let you keep your secret.”

“Maybe not,” Shar told him. “Secrets that tear two people apart are destructive and potentially dangerous.”

“But-”

“The fact is, Chris, that secrets come in all varieties. What you do about them, too. You can expose them, and then everybody gets hurt. You can make a tacit agreement to keep them, and by the time they come out, nobody cares, but keeping them’s still extracted a toll on you. Or you can share them with a select group of trusted people and agree to do something about them.”

“What’re you trying to tell me?”

“The group of people in this room is a small and closed-mouthed one. We all know Ira can keep his own counsel. Bobby Gardena’s been in this tomb a long time, but I doubt he’s rested in a more suitable place on the property, and created a better monument to him.”

I said, “A better monument, like a garden in the colors of the rainbow.”

Chris nodded. A faint ray of hope touched Ira’s tortured features.

I added, “Of course, a fitting monument to both Bobby and Tom would be if you renovated this hotel like you planned and reopened it to the living.”

Chris nodded again. Then he went to Ira, grasped the warning tape, and tore it free where it was anchored to the pigeonholes.

I rode in the back of the van on our way home to the city, making sure the Seeburg Trashcan didn’t slip its mooring. Both Shar and I were quiet as we maneuvered it up my building’s elevator and into the apartment.

Later, after Neal promised to become the fifth party to a closely held secret, I told him the story of August 16, 1978. He was quiet too.

But still later, when we’d jockeyed the Trashcan into position in our living room and plugged it in, the nostalgic tunes of happier times played long into the night, heralding happy times to come.