and insulated enough so that none of the South Park sounds penetrated. She was in the midst of a big, teeming city, with only a hundred yards or so separating her from crowds of people having a good time, but it was as if she were a long way off from anybody, alone on an island of light surrounded by darkness.
Lucas had done this to her. Just when she’d gotten her life back in sync, he’d screwed it up again. Brought the loneliness back. Damn him! Then she thought: Sure, blame him, but blame yourself, too. Tamara Corbin, hotshot de-tective, who makes all the wrong personal decisions, who tries to live in the fast lane but keeps ending up as lifestyle roadkill.
She got herself out of there. She had a weird feeling that if she stayed any longer, she might really start feeling sorry for herself.
13
I was two minutes from home, coming down off Diamond Heights on my way to the agency, when my cell phone went off. Never fails. Seems like the thing is always silent until I’m in the car and driving and then it rings incessantly. Early start today. It was only eight fifteen.
I could have let the call go onto voice mail, but I’m compulsive about answering the phone-a habit I picked up in the lean days when I first opened the agency and couldn’t afford to miss a potential client. I pulled over and stopped before I answered, something else I’m compulsive about. People who drive with a cell clapped against their ear and too-little attention to the road are one of my pet peeves. You don’t see quite as many doing it now that the new state law banning handheld cellular phones while operating a motor vehicle finally has kicked in, but there’re still too many to suit me. The fines aren’t nearly stiff enough to be an effective deterrent, and the ones who risk getting caught seem to take a sneaky self-satisfaction in flaunting a law they consider an unnecessary infringement on their personal rights. If I were a patrol cop, I’d spend a couple of days a week pulling them over and writing them up just to hear them whine.
The caller was Helen Alvarez. Excited and a little breathless. “It happened again last night,” she said.
“What did?”
“He broke into Margaret’s house again. Patterson or whoever he is. Walked right into her bedroom at three a.m., bold as brass.”
“He didn’t harm her?”
“No. Just scared the wits out of her.”
“She all right now?”
“Better than most women her age would be.”
“Did she get a good look at him?”
“No. Wouldn’t have even if all the lights had been on.”
“Why not?”
“He was wearing a sheet.”
“He was… what?”
“A sheet,” Helen Alvarez said grimly, “wearing a white sheet and making noises like a ghost.”
When I got to the Abbott house I found a reception committee of three on the front porch: Helen Alvarez, Leonard Crenshaw, and Everett Belasco, talking animatedly among themselves. Crenshaw was saying as I came up the walk, “… Should have called the police instead. They’re the ones ought to be investigating this.”
“What can they do?” his sister said. “There aren’t any signs of breaking and entering this time, either. Nothing damaged, nothing stolen. Just Margaret’s word that a man in a sheet was there in the first place. They’d probably say she imagined the whole thing.”
“Well, maybe she did,” Belasco said. “I mean, all that nonsense about her dead husband coming back to haunt her…”
“Ev, she didn’t say it was a ghost she saw. She said it was a man in a sheet pretending to be a ghost. There’s a big difference.”
“She still could’ve imagined it. Or dreamed it.”
Mrs. Alvarez appealed to me. “It happened; I’m sure it did. She may be a bit fanciful, but she doesn’t see things that aren’t there.”
“Is she up to talking about it?”
“I told her you were coming. She’s waiting.”
“Guess you don’t need me,” Belasco said. He bumped against Crenshaw as he turned, winced, and rubbed at a bandage across the back of his right hand.
Crenshaw asked, “What’d you do to your hand, Ev?”
“Goddamn knife slipped while I was slicing bacon this morning. Hurts like the devil.”
“If it’s a deep cut,” Mrs. Alvarez said, “you better have a doctor look at it.”
“No, it’s not deep. Just painful.” A gust of icy wind swept over the porch. Belasco shivered and said, “Damn, it’s cold out here. Come on, Leonard, I’ve got a pot of fresh coffee made.”
“No thanks,” Crenshaw said, “I got work to do.” He gave me a brief disapproving look and said pointedly to his sister, “Just remember, Helen-chickens always come home to roost.”
“Yes, and you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”
“Bah,” he said.
“Silly old fool,” she said.
Mrs. Alvarez and I went into the house. Margaret Abbott was perched on her Boston rocker, a shawl over her lap and Spike, the orange tabby, curled up asleep on the shawl. She looked tired; the rouge she’d applied to her cheeks was like bloody splotches on too-white parchment. Still, she seemed in good spirits. And she showed no reluctance to discuss her latest ordeal.
“It’s really rather amusing,” she said, “now that I look back on it. A grown man wearing a sheet and moaning and groaning like Casper with a tummy ache.”
“You’re sure it was a man?”
“Oh yes. Definitely a man.”
“You didn’t recognize his voice?”
“Well, he didn’t speak. Just moaned and groaned.”
“Did you say anything to him?”
“I believe I asked what he thought he was doing in my bedroom. Yes, and I said that he’d better not have harmed Spike. It was Spike crying that woke me, you see.”
“Not the intruder coming into your bedroom?”
“No. Spike yowling as if he’d been hurt. He must have heard the man come into the house and gone to investigate and the man stepped on him or kicked him. Poor Spike. You’ve been through so much, haven’t you, dear?”
Spike opened one eye and yawned.
I said, “Then what happened, Mrs. Abbott? After you woke up.”
“Well, I saw a flickery sort of light in the hallway. At first I couldn’t imagine what it was.”
“Flashlight,” Mrs. Alvarez said.
“Yes. It came closer, into the doorway, then switched off and the man walked right up to the foot of my bed and began moaning and groaning and jumping around.” She smiled wanly. “Really, it was rather funny.”
“How long did he keep up his act?”
“Not long. Just until I spoke sternly to him.”
“Then he ran out?”
“Still moaning and groaning, yes. I suppose he wanted me to think he was the spirit of my late husband. As if I wouldn’t know a living man from a dead one. Or Carl, in or out of a sheet.”
Charley Doyle, I was thinking. A stupid ghost stunt was just the sort a pea-brain like him would come up with. He’d deny it, of course. And probably claim he’d spent all of last night with darlin’ Melanie, not that that was a
