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, “
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
