Paper Phoenix: A Mystery of San Francisco in the '70s (A Classic Cozy--with Romance!) Read online

  Praise for Paper Phoenix:

  “Wickedly delicious… What makes (Thompson's) book so particularly wonderful is the way it accomplishes the detective novel’s covert mission of urban analysis and social criticism.”

  —San Francisco Examiner

  “(She) knows how to create that sense of place which is so important to any novel, but particularly to crime fiction; her characters are believable men and women in a real world…”

  —P.D. James

  Paper Phoenix

  A Mystery of San Francisco in the ’70’s

  By Michaela Thompson

  booksBnimble Publishing

  New Orleans, La.

  Paper Phoenix

  Copyright 1986 by Mickey Friedman

  Cover by Andy Brown

  ISBN: 978162517467

  www.booksbnimble.com

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First booksBnimble Publishing electronic publication: June 2013

  eBook editions by eBooks by Barb for booknook.biz

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Dedication Guarantee

  If You Enjoyed This Book…

  Other Books by Michaela Thompson

  A Respectful Request About the Author

  One

  Until Richard left me, I had never thought much about murder. After he left me, I thought about it a great deal. Being abandoned by your husband when you’ve just turned forty-four is enough to make any woman consider violence, and being abandoned for a law student almost exactly twenty years your junior is a situation begging for mayhem.

  But violence in the abstract, such as a satisfying fantasy of beating Richard bloody, is a long way from the real thing. Larry Hawkins’s death and its aftermath taught me that, and a good deal more besides, at a time when I imagined I had very little left to learn.

  The popular wisdom of the moment said that I was OK and you were OK. I could go only halfway with that. I was OK, or I had done my best to be. I had been faithful, supportive, loyal, an ornament to Richard’s career. I had gotten myself on committees of various cultural and philanthropic organizations and willed myself to care about their projects. I had sat through political dinners, my eyes watering with cigar smoke and suppressed yawns, when I would’ve preferred being at home with a good book. I had been pretty close to OK.

  Nothing could convince me, on the other hand, that you were OK, if “you” meant Richard. Because to kick a perfectly OK wife in her stylish-but-not-flashy posterior is not OK and never will be, no matter what writers sympathetic to the problems of the male menopause say.

  I thought about murder. When Richard closed the door behind him, my career as Mrs. Richard Longstreet, San Francisco Big Shot, was officially over. I was left with a renovated and rapidly appreciating pre-Earthquake cottage on Lake Street with a dining table at which the mayor would never again have dinner. The curtain had descended, and I was left in the dark backstage with the sudden suspicion that my big scenes had already been played.

  A difficult situation was made more difficult by the fact that 1975, the year of Richard’s defection, was also the year that San Francisco— or, perhaps more accurately, the San Francisco press— discovered older women. In previous times, we females had marked the passing years in relative tranquility. Now, we were in ferment. At the age of forty-four, fifty-four, sixty-four, we were retreading ourselves for the job market, taking assertiveness training, petitioning our congressmen. We were banding together and starting cute new restaurants. We were learning carpentry and setting up communes on rolling acreage north of the city, where we birthed calves, walked around in mud-splattered hip boots, and lived in raw redwood cabins with no indoor plumbing. We were on the move.

  I wasn’t going anywhere. Sitting in my glass-enclosed sun porch overlooking Mountain Lake Park, I would drop the paper beside my chair and watch the winter rain batter the weaving branches of the almond tree. When I got tired of doing that I would take a pill and lie down.

  Since I wasn’t ready for calf-birthing, I had, as I saw it at the time, three possibilities: dye my hair, take a cruise, or commit suicide.

  I decided against dying my hair. Even with a little gray here and there the chestnut was holding its own. After briefer consideration I also dismissed cosmetic nips and tucks on the eyelids and jawline. “You have good bones, Maggie,” my mother used to say, comforting me for being too thin. By this time I was glad. The less flesh, the fewer possibilities for sagging. My chin was a bit sharper than when I was twenty, and my eyes (the color of apple-green jade, Richard had rhapsodized in happier days) had seen a lot more, but I’d continue without chemical or surgical intervention. If Richard had chosen to see me, his domestic reflection, as on the verge of decay, that was his problem.

  No cruise, either. I wasn’t ready to fend off the attentions of vacationing liquor salesmen whose wives were confined to the cabin with a touch of mal de mer and playing shuffleboard with other fun-loving divorcees didn’t appeal to me either. What I dreaded most was the thought that I’d probably fling myself at some greasy-haired ship’s vocalist wearing a diamond pinky ring and, worst of all, be rejected by him.

  Suicide was my last option. I finally nixed it because I was too damn mad at Richard to give him the satisfaction. He would have played the scene well. His gray hair and elongated face gave him an attenuated, spiritual look that his black suit set off wonderfully. He would have stood, to all appearances guilt-ridden and grief-stricken, at my bier, and every woman at the service would have thought he looked worth committing suicide over. And underneath it all, he would have felt nothing.

  ***

  If Larry Hawkins hadn’t died, I might never have taken off my salmon-colored peignoir again. Looking back, it seems that I wore it all day, every day, for months. That can’t be true, because I am fairly meticulous, and must have laundered it occasionally. I don’t remember. In fact, I remember very little of that time. I moved through the days like a salmon-colored blur, soft around the edges and the center completely dissolved, like a piece of chocolate candy that’s been left in the sun. Or like my marriage. My marriage had dissolved, too. That’s why they call it “dissolution of marriage,” I reasoned in my befuddled way. My brain didn’t work so well in those days, because
I was taking a great many pills.

  There was a pill in the morning, to calm my system down from the shock of getting out of bed. Then one at noon, to prepare me for my afternoon nap. At bedtime there had to be another to assure me of a good night’s sleep. Those were the regulars. If I started feeling jumpy in between, or burned the toast, or got a phone call from my lawyer, it was reason enough to take another. I was turning into a dissolving, salmon-colored junkie.

  This situation continued from before Christmas to early March. How long it might have gone on I don’t know. I suppose I could still be stumbling around the house, subsisting on canned soup and staring moodily at whatever happened to be on television, if I hadn’t been awakened one afternoon by the sound of the newspaper slapping against the front steps.

  It was four o’clock, and I had been sleeping since one. From what I had seen out the windows, it had been a glorious early-spring day— the sky a profound California blue, the park meadow the daisy-spangled bright green that comes after periodic hard drenching. Through the branches of the almond tree, now furred with delicate white blossoms, I had seen some neighborhood athletes braving the muddy parcourse. Then I had gone to sleep. When the thump of the paper penetrated my stupor I opened my eyes and watched the patterns the lowering sun was making on the bedspread of the king-sized bed in which I lay, still habituated, on my accustomed half.

  The Herald. For once the delivery boy hit the steps, instead of the Japanese magnolia tree next to them, or the slick-leaved boxwood bushes at the bottom. What time was it? I was distinctly put out. The newsboy’s accuracy had robbed me of another half hour to forty-five minutes of sleep, which would have meant my waking just in time to start thinking about which Campbell’s production to have for dinner. Now, it was too early.

  When each minute of consciousness is a burden, an extra forty-five of them constitutes an almost insurmountable tragedy. What in hell would I do until dinnertime? I concentrated, watching the motes of dust spinning slowly in the ray of sunlight that had slipped past the curtains. I would read the paper. It was poetic justice. The paper woke me, so instead of taking my usual cursory glance at the headlines, I would read every story in the paper, and then I could eat, watch television, and take another pill. Full of purpose, I climbed out of bed.

  I almost gave up. More Watergate fallout. Another stabbing at San Quentin. A group of “displaced homemakers” was petitioning Congress for reform of the marriage laws. Fifteen minutes had passed. Basic Development Corporation, low bidder on the project, had submitted final plans for the proposed Golden State Center to Richard Longstreet, San Francisco redevelopment director. That was too much. It was hard enough putting Richard out of my mind without reading about him and his idiotic Redevelopment Agency in the papers. Grimly, I leafed through to the obituary page, possibly hoping to see his name.

  The name I saw wasn’t Richard Longstreet, but Larry Hawkins.

  It was a short, uninformative article headed LOCAL EDITOR DIES IN FALL. I read it three times without stopping:

  ***

  Larry Hawkins, 35, editor-publisher of the People’s Times, a weekly newspaper devoted to local politics, was found dead this morning in an alley outside the Times offices at 1140 Cleveland Street, a police spokesman said. Hawkins, an apparent suicide, had fallen from his office window on the building’s seventh floor. A note was found, the spokesman said.

  Hawkins, self-styled “gadfly” of the City’s political establishment, was a well-known local figure. The People’s Times began publication three years ago. Hawkins is survived by his wife, Susanna, and two sons.

  I put the paper down. So Larry Hawkins had committed suicide. I must have seen him a hundred times, maybe more— a slender man about five feet four, with a Byronic profile and a tumbling, unkempt headful of black curls, a rather attractive air of grubbiness about him. Although he was known to feel that anyone connected with City Hall was a natural adversary, there were people who considered it chic to flaunt their liberal tendencies and hound’s-tooth cleanliness by inviting him to their parties. Perhaps they wanted to show they weren’t afraid to let a righteous radical journalist loose in their china closets, no matter how out of place he might look and be.

  Why he attended these gatherings I don’t know, unless he was in search of stories. I doubt that was the only reason. I think he got some sort of thrill from swaggering into an impeccably dressed group wearing his dirty beige corduroy jacket, his patched jeans, and his cracked boots. His moral superiority was evident always. He showed it in his contempt for all of us, the establishment he despised and excoriated week after week in the Times. After a perfunctory handshake for his hostess, he would usually station himself as close to the food and drink as possible, watching everyone with quick, dark eyes. And the next week, likely as not, one of his fellow guests would turn up in the pages of the Times as having given the City rest room contract to a toilet paper firm owned by his brother-in-law.

  I wasn’t thinking about Larry now, but Richard. When I closed my eyes, I could see his long fingers curving around the telephone receiver, see his straight, navy blue, impeccably tailored back. I could hear his voice saying, impatiently, “Sure, I agree Larry Hawkins is a pain in the ass…” I had stood in the doorway of the study, wearing the same salmon-colored peignoir I was wearing now. It was the end of October, and Richard was going to leave me.

  Richard was nothing if not civilized, so he had waited until after I had my first cup of coffee, and told me over the raisin toast as we sat at the kitchen table having breakfast. Picking up crumbs and rolling them between his fingers, he broke out phrases like “better for both of us,” and “well taken care of,” and “haven’t really communicated in years.” There wasn’t a word about his law student lady friend. I truly don’t remember the occasion very well, even now.

  Once he said, “Can’t you understand, Maggie?” and reached out to touch my arm. I pulled back as if he had scalded me and knocked a jar of quince preserves off the table. Typical of Richard, to let other people make his messes for him while he watched, bemused at their clumsiness. As well as I remember, I hadn’t said a word up until then, except a polite “You are?” when he said he was going. After the preserves jar broke, it seemed extremely important that it be cleaned up thoroughly and immediately. While I got up for paper towels, the phone rang.

  There’s an extension in the kitchen, but Richard said, vehemently, “God damn it to hell!” and went to answer it in the study— glad, no doubt, to escape the sight of me bending pathetically over the preserves. When the floor was clean, I looked around for him. I must have been in shock, because I had forgotten about the phone call, and when I didn’t see him it occurred to me that perhaps, having informed me of his intentions, he had simply left, not feeling the need for further elucidation. Dazed, I wandered into the living room and heard his voice coming from the study. I stood in the study door and saw Richard standing next to the desk, his back to me. His voice was irritated, emphatic. He said, “Sure, I agree Larry Hawkins is a pain in the ass. But you can absolutely take my word for it, we won’t have to worry about him much longer.” I turned around and walked back to the kitchen.

  Now, I picked up the paper and read Larry’s obituary one more time. We won’t have to worry about him much longer. No. We certainly won’t.

  Two

  I didn’t let myself think about it any longer, as if I had looked straight at the sun and didn’t want to look again. I followed the rest of my daily routine carefully. Because I was still a little ahead of time, the evening pill had made me sleepy enough that I could reasonably switch off the television before the eleven-o’clock news, thus avoiding possible reminders of Larry’s fate.

  I moved through the next day like the zombie I was. It wasn’t until slightly more than twenty-four hours after I had first read it that I walked back out on the sun porch and saw the previous day’s paper, turned to Larry’s obituary, lying beside my chair. I was overwhelmed by a rage so intense that I had to si
t down before my knees gave way.

  Larry and I had been in the same boat, hadn’t we? Both of us had given Richard Longstreet a pain in the ass, and look at us now. Giving Richard a pain in the ass was obviously hazardous to your health, if not dangerous to your life.

  In that bright burst of hatred I never doubted that Richard had somehow maneuvered Larry Hawkins into committing suicide, if he hadn’t literally pushed him out the window. How else could he have been so certain on the telephone? “You can absolutely take my word for it,” he had said. I remembered it more clearly than anything else that had happened that morning.

  All at once, I couldn’t sit still. Invigorated by anger, I got up and paced the room, clenching and unclenching my fists. It was so unfair. It was utterly, completely unfair. Things always went Richard’s way. Does a newspaper editor bother you? A few months later he’s dead. Does your wife cramp your style? Kick her aside. Don’t under any circumstances let anything slow you down.

  It would be such a satisfaction, just this once, to see him fail to get away with it. It would be the purest joy I could ever know to see him get caught. I stopped walking. It was impossible. There was nothing whatsoever I could do. Nothing. I sat down.

  I thought about Larry. I had had only a single real conversation with him, and that took place because we were both somewhat drunk. It was at a fund-raising dinner for a Board of Supervisors candidate, held in a private room at one of the fancy Nob Hill hotels. Because of the terrible pressure of public service, the guest of honor hadn’t shown up yet, and it was getting on for nine-thirty. The hors d’oeuvres trays were ravaged, and since dinner couldn’t be served there was little to do but drink, or put one’s head in an ashtray and go to sleep, or both. Richard was, as usual, deep in a huddle with the few selected bigwigs who could do him the most good, and I had exhausted my small talk. A white wine or even, God help us, some sort of mineral water would have been the trendy tipple, but I decided to continue bucking the trend and went to order another Scotch. Larry Hawkins was leaning against the bar, his corduroy elbow just missing a puddle, and as I picked up my drink I noticed him watching me. He lifted his glass in a mocking little toast and then leaned over and said, “Bunch of turkeys.”