McCone and Friends (28 page)

I’d stay there tonight, I decided. In some weird way, it felt safer than my nest upstairs.

Donna Conway called me at eight-ten the next morning. I’d already gone to my office—a closet under the stairs that some joker had passed off as a den when All Souls moved into the house years before—and was clutching a cup of the battery acid that Ted calls coffee and trying to get my life back together. When my intercom buzzed, I jerked and grabbed the phone receiver without first asking who it was.

Donna said dully, “The backpack I told you Adrian always took to school with her? They found it where poor Kirby was murdered.”

I went to put my cup down, tipped it, and watched coffee soak into my copy of the morning paper. Bad day already. “They—you mean the police?”

“Yes. They just brought it over for me to identify.”

“Where was it? In the yard?”

“Inside the house. It’d been there a long time because the yogurt—she always took a cup of yogurt to work to eat on her break—was spoiled.”

Not good at all.

“Rae, you don’t think it means she did that to Kirby, do you?”

“I doubt it.” What I thought it meant was that Adrian was dead, maybe had been dead since shortly after she disappeared—but I wasn’t going to raise
that
issue yet. “What else was in the pack besides the yogurt?”

A pause. “The usual stuff, I guess. I didn’t ask. I was too upset.”

I’d get Sharon to check that out with her friend Adah Joslyn.

Donna added, “The police said that Kirby was the one who rented the house, and that there was a girl with him when he first looked at it who matched Adrian’s description.”

“When?”

“Late last July. I guess…well, with teenagers today, you just assume they’re sexually active. Adrian and I had a talk about safe sex two years ago. But I don’t understand why they thought they needed to rent a place to be together. I’m not home all that much, and neither are Kirby’s parents. Besides, they couldn’t have spent much time at that house; Adrian worked six days a week, after school and on Saturdays, and she was usually home by her curfew.”

I thought about Kirby’s “job” at the nonexistent garage. Maybe Adrian’s had been a front, too. But, no, that didn’t wash—the store’s manager, Sue Hanford, and the plaza security man, Ben Waterson, had confirmed her employment both to me and the police.

“Rae?” Donna said. “Will you keep looking for her?”

“Of course.”

“Will you call me if you find out anything? I’ll be here all day today. I can’t face going to work.”

I said I would, but I was afraid that what I’d have to tell her wouldn’t be anything she’d want to hear.

“Yeah, the little weasel wanted to pick up her pay, in cash.” Ben Waterson plopped back in the metal chair behind the front desk in the Ocean Park Plaza security office. Its legs groaned threateningly under his massive weight. On the walls around us were mounted about two dozen TV screens that monitored what was going on in various stores in the center, switching from one to another for spot checking. Waterson glanced at one, looked closer, then shook his head. “In cash, no less, the little weasel said, since he couldn’t cash her check. Said she owed him money. Can you imagine?”

I leaned against the counter. There wasn’t another chair in the room, and Waterson hadn’t offered to find me one. “Why’d he ask you for it, rather than Ms. Hanford? Adrian was paid by Left Coast Casuals, not the plaza, wasn’t she?”

“Sue was out and had left me in charge of the store.” Waterson scratched at the beer belly that bulged over the waist of his khaki uniform pants. “Can you imagine?” he said again. “Kids today.” He snorted.

Waterson was your basic low-level security guy, although he’d risen higher than most of them ever go. I know, because I worked among them until my then-boss took pity on me and recommended me to Sharon for the job at All Souls. It’s a familiar type: not real bright, not too great to look at, and lacking in most of the social graces. About all you need to get in on the ground floor of the business is never to have been arrested or caught molesting the neighbors’ dog on the front lawn at high noon. Ben Waterson—well, I doubted he’d been arrested because he didn’t look like he had the ambition to commit a crime, but I wasn’t too sure about his conduct toward the neighborhood pets.

“So you told Kirby to get lost?” I asked.

“I told him to fuck off, pardon my French. And he got pissed off, pardon it again, and left.”

“He say why Adrian owed him money?”

“Nah. Who knows? Probably for a drug buy. Kids today.”

“Did Adrian do drugs?”

“They all do.”

“But did you ever know
her
to do them?”

“Didn’t have to. They all do.” He looked accusingly at me. From his fifty-something perspective, I probably was young enough to be classified as one on today’s youthful degenerates.

I shifted to a more comfortable position, propping my hip against the counter. Waterson scanned the monitors again, then looked back at me.

“Let me ask you this,” I said. “How well did you know Kirby Dalson?”

His eyes narrowed. “What the hell’s that suppose to mean?”

I hadn’t thought it was a particularly tricky question. “How well did you know him?” I repeated. “What kind of kid was he?”

“Oh. Just a kid. A weasel-faced punk. I had a daughter, I wouldn’t let him near her.”

“You mentioned drugs. Was Kirby dealing?”

“Probably.”

“Why do you say that?”

He rolled his eyes. “I told you –kids today.” Then, unselfconsciously, he started to pick his nose.

I didn’t need any more of this, so I headed downstairs to Sue Hartford’s office at Left Coast Casuals.

Hartford was a sleek blonde around my age, in her late twenties. One of those women who is moving up in the business world in spite of a limited education, relying on her toughness and brains. On Monday, she’d told me she started in an after school job like Adrian’s at the Redwood City branch of the clothing chain and had managed two of their other stores before being selected for the plum position at the then-new plaza. When she saw me standing in the office door, Hanford motioned for me to come in and sit down. She continued working at her computer for a minute. Then she swiveled toward me, face arranged in formally solemn lines.

“I read in the paper about the Conway girl’s boyfriend,” she said. “So awful. So young.”

I told her about Adrian’s backpack being found in the house, and she made perfunctorily horrified noises.

“This doesn’t mean Adrian killed Kirby, does it?” she asked.

“Doubtful. It looked as if the pack’s been there since right after she disappeared.”

For a moment her features went very still. “Then Kirby might have killed…”

“Yes.”

“But where is the …?”

“Body? Well, not at the house, I’m sure the cops would have found it by now.”

“Or else she…”

“She what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she ran away. Maybe frightened her somehow.”

Interesting assumption. “Are you saying Adrian was afraid of Kirby?”

Quickly she shook her head. “No. Well, maybe. It was more like…he dominated her. One look from him was all she needed, and she’d do whatever he wanted her to.”

“Give me an example.”

“Well, one time I saw them at a table near the food concessions in the middle of the mall. He had a burger, she was spooning up her yogurt. All of a sudden, Kirby pointed at his burger, then jerked his chin at the condiment counter. Adrian got up and scurried over there and brought him back some catsup.”

“So he pretty much controlled her?”

“I’d say so.”

“What else?”

She shrugged. “That’s about the best example I can give you. I didn’t really see that much of them together. We try to discourage our girls from having their friends come into the store during working hours.”

“When I spoke with you earlier this week, you said you doubted Adrian was a drug user. Are you sure of that?”

“Reasonably sure. I observe our girls very carefully. I can’t have anything like that going on, especially not on store premises. It would reflect badly on my abilities as a manager.” Her eyes lost focus suddenly. “God, what if something has happened to Adrian? I mean, something like what happened to Kirby? That would reflect badly, too. The damage control I’d need to do…”

I said wryly, “I don’t think that as store manager you can be held responsible for what happens to your employees off-hours.”

“You don’t understand, it would reflect badly on my abilities to size up a prospective employee.” Her eyes refocused on my face. “I can see you think I’m uncaring. Maybe to some degree I am. But I’m running a business here. I’m building a career, and I have to be strong. I have a small daughter to raise, and I’m fiercely protective of her chances to have a good life. I’m sorry Kirby Dalson’s dead. If Adrian’s also been killed, than I’m sorry about that, too. But, really, neither of them has anything to do with me, with my life.”

That’s the trouble, I thought. The poet, whoever he was, said no man is an island, but nowadays
every
man and woman is one. A whole goddamn continent, the way some of them act. It’s a wonder that they all don’t sink to the bottom of the ocean, just like the lost continent of Atlantis is supposed to have done.

V

I wanted to drive by the house on Naples Street, just to see what it looked like in the daylight. The rain had stopped, but it was still a soppy, gray morning. The house looked shabby and sodden. There was a yellow plastic police line strip across the driveway, and a man in a tan raincoat stood on the front steps, hands in his pockets, staring at nothing in particular.

He didn’t look like a cop. He was middle-aged, middle height, a little gray, a little bald. His glasses and the cut of his coat were the kind you used to associate with the movers and shakers of the 1980’s financial world, but the coat was rumpled and had a grease stain near its hem, and as I got out of the Wreck and went closer, I saw that one hinge of the glasses frame was wired together. His face pulled down in disappointed lines that looked permanent. Welcome to the nineties, I thought.

The man’s eyes focused dully on me. “If you’re a reporter,” he said, “you’d better speak with the officers in charge of the case.” He spoke with a kind of diluted authority, his words turning up in a question, as if he wasn’t quite sure who or what he was any longer.

“I’m not a reporter.” I took out my i.d. and explained my connection to the case.

The man looked at the i.d., nodded, and shrugged. Then he sighed. “Hell of a thing, isn’t it? I wish I’d never rented to them.”

“This is your house?”

“My mother’s. She’s in a nursing home. I can’t sell it—she still thinks she’s coming back someday. That’s all that’s keeping her alive. I can’t fix it up, either.” He motioned at the peeling façade. “My business has been in a flat-out slump for a couple of years now, and the nursing home’s expensive. I rented to the first couple who answered my ad. Bad judgment on my part. They were too young, and into God-knows-what.” He laughed mirthlessly, then added, “Sorry, I didn’t introduce myself. Ron Owens.”

I’d inched up the steps toward the open front door until I was standing next to him. I shook his outstretched hand and repeated my name for him.