If Walls Could Talk (27 page)

“And you’re very sure there was nothing hidden in the house, somehow? Could Walter have hidden valuable gems somewhere?”

“Nah,” he scoffed. “That’s what that cop kept asking, too. If there was something there, don’t you think I would have found it over all those years? I did all my own repair work there, you know. I’m pretty handy.”

I thought of some of the former owner’s “repairs” we had found in the house: He had made one electrical connection with parts taken from a miniature train set. It was a wonder the whole place hadn’t burned down years ago.

“And why would Walter kill himself if there was something real?” Gerald wheezed. “He couldn’t stand the disgrace of being duped. Or maybe . . . maybe it was something else. But he killed himself; that much is sure.”

“Your old neighbor, Meredith Montgomery, mentioned that you might have sensed another presence in the house.”

He gazed at me, his lips drawn tight and disapproving. “Yeah. Maybe.”

“And you don’t think it was Walter Buchanan?”

He shook his head. “It haunted Walter. Still does. It . . . it haunted me, too. Finally I just gave in and sold, and came to this goddamned place where people won’t leave me alone.”

“Meredith mentioned that you sat in on a séance or two.”

“My neighbors,” he scoffed. “Not one of ’em has come by to visit—not that I’d want them to. Meredith called once or twice. And Celia was all right, but that kid of hers was rotten.”

“Vincent?”

“He was a bad kid from the start. And then, when I was gonna sell the house, he started up the rumors, talking about how it was haunted.”

“But I thought you agreed that it was haunted.”

“Back in my day you kept that kind of information to yourself. Don’t have to go hanging your dirty laundry out for everyone to hear.”

“How did Vincent spread the rumors? Who did he tell?”

“Went on the goddamned whaddayacallit? The Internets. Told the world, I guess. When I went to sell the house, the buyer showed me all these things he printed from the computer. The Realtor said I had to admit it, and then the guy offered less because of it. God damn it.”

“This was Kenneth Kostow?”

“Yeah. Guy cheated me out of plenty, I tell you what.”

 

My mind raced as I drove across the bridge into San Francisco. Did this mean Vincent and Kenneth had been working together to lower the price of Gerald’s house . . . or had Vincent had been doing it for his own reasons? Maybe he was trying to help his mother in her acquisition of the property, and Kenneth stepped in and took advantage of the situation. In which case Vincent might have reason to be angry with Kenneth.

And Gerald said the gem field was all a scam . . . but what if not everyone believed that? What if Kenneth and/or the other investors thought the gems were still hidden in the house? That would explain why they came after the items we took from the house to put in storage.

Once again, I felt relieved to pull up to the St. Francis Wood job site and turn my thoughts to the work at hand.

The landscapers, as usual, had accomplished a great deal in very little time. It was always amazing to see a team of ten people swarming over a yard, transforming it almost overnight from a weed-pocked junkyard into a bucolic haven. This was especially true when clients had the money to invest in mature plants. Even the trees looked as though they’d been there for years. The Zabens now had a beautiful sandstone pathway leading up to and around either side of a central fountain, three pools of descending size topped by a figure of Pan. Water tinkled merrily; it would attract birds once all the workers were gone.

Sod had been laid on either side of the pathway, which was rimmed with flowering shrubs and vines. Lately many Californians were opting for naturalized gardens, which were low maintenance and drought-resistant. Not the Zabens: They had worked with a landscape designer I recommended to create a traditional manicured French-inspired garden.

Inside, the faux finishers had transformed the living room walls with a parchment finish and completed painting the mural in the playroom and clouds on the girls’ ceilings. A border of monochromatic seashells, painted in various sepia tones, marched just below the dental molding on the sage green walls of the girls’ bathroom. The master bath was bordered in a wispy painted garland of ivy and cupids, sanded back and glazed over so it looked as though it had been there for years. The tumbled stone of the separate bath and shower surrounds set it off perfectly. The sink was hammered copper, and sat above the counter like a bowl. Alongside the Tuscan-inspired architecture, the huge bathroom also included modern conveniences like radiant heat under the stone floor, non-fogging mirrors, and a huge flat-screened TV.

Raul was installing the handmade blown glass I had bought from Bendheim architectural glass in Oakland, near Alameda. The sheets of glass were precious; expensive and gorgeous, marked by the tiny bubbles and uneven surface common to glass made the old-fashioned way. It wasn’t practical to use in every window, but I loved placing bits and pieces here and there. We were using amber, red, and blue glass in the transoms above the bedrooms, so when the lights shone through, there was a lovely glow on the other side.

The last time I was at Ohmega Salvage, a beautiful “junkyard”—more like an antiques store—in Berkeley, I had stumbled across a pair of arched, paneled, Gothic-style wooden doors. I convinced the Zabens to let us use these rather than the new master bedroom doors that were on back order. After all, the new doors would have to be faux-distressed, whereas these were already old, and beautiful, intact but wearing their history proudly. Unfortunately, most reclaimed doors don’t come with their own frame, which made fitting them into new construction tricky at best. The doors’ distinctive arched tops did not match the current frame, so we had one of our best carpenters working on the solution. He almost had it.

I still needed a perfect rectangular leaded-glass piece to use in the door between the kitchen and the dining room. As usual, I could have a new one made, but I’d rather find an old one. Clearly I needed to make some time to scout the salvage yards.

Finally, I got a worker to help me pack two heavy porcelain-covered iron sinks into the back of my car. They were chipped and stained, in need of help from the Sink Factory in Berkeley. The sink doctor would cure what ailed them.

 

Secure that all was proceeding well at the Zabens’ house, I headed back toward Vallejo Street. The careful demolition was moving along nicely. The men still hadn’t found anything special in the walls, but they’d put together quite a collection of salvaged items: woodwork, hardware, doors.

The only place I hadn’t inspected thoroughly was the basement. I had been down there months ago, when I did the initial house inspection, but not since.

I still couldn’t find a key, so I took out my tools and removed the door from its hinges.

As in most basements, steep stairs led down into what seemed to be a dark pit. It was no wonder that so many horror novels featured cellars—they tend to bring out the inner claustrophobe in us all. But when I flipped on the overhead light—a simple incandescent bulb hanging from a cord—it revealed nothing more sinister than a musty smell, an uneven brick floor, and a massive octopus-type heater with elephantine ductwork reaching up through different parts of the house. Despite its impressive physique, the heater hadn’t functioned in years.

I studied the newly built brick wall that blocked the old pass-through to Celia’s twin house. Laying my hands on it, I tried to sense something. I had no idea what. I was one sorry psychic.

I knocked around at the base of the wall, pulling some of the loose floor bricks away. There was no foundation laid; it looked as though the opening from the floor to the low ceiling had simply been bricked up. The floor had been laid in bricks also, but not well. The mortar was thin and insufficient for the task of lying on damp dirt for years. Cement, and even bricks, wick moisture up into themselves. Mortar will eventually crumble if it doesn’t have a chance to dry out.

Meredith said Celia had bricked over bones. My stomach turned. What was she referring to?

Just as the thought popped into my head, Kenneth appeared, crouching down near the pile of bricks. I could feel mournfulness coming from him—this was more than his typical depression.

“What is it?” I whispered, hoping no one overheard.

He didn’t answer.

It didn’t take Brittany Humm to point out that when a ghost seems particularly mournful in a dirt basement that has been strangely bricked over, there might be something to check out.

I looked at my watch. Twelve thirty. I was supposed to meet Zach-the-photographer in half an hour. I needed to get washed up and on the road.

“Kenneth?” I asked again. “Can you tell me what you’re feeling?”

He just shook his head and shrugged.

I hesitated, torn between investigating further and making my next appointment. Finally I decided talking to the living would tell me more than hanging out with the dead. Plus . . . I wasn’t entirely sure I was ready for what I might find.

The basement—and its secrets—would have to wait.

 

Zachary Malinski lived in a 1940s-era apartment building near the corner of Divisadero and Golden Gate. He buzzed me in through the huge mahogany front door and told me he was on the first floor, to the left. The long, old-fashioned hallway was completely lined—floor, walls, and ceiling—in original wood paneling. Glass windows in the apartment doors, all of which had been painted over, made the place seem almost like a converted office building, but it was really just a holdover from a time when people weren’t afraid everyone at the door meant to hurt them.

A door opened and Zachary Malinski stepped halfway into the hall.

His dark hair was artfully tousled. He wore faded jeans, black socks, and a very white T-shirt that strained slightly across his broad chest. Talk about your Diet Pepsi commercials.

“I was so glad you called,” he said with a warm smile as his sherry brown eyes looked me up and down. His voice sounded amused.

“I wanted to ask you a few more questions,” I answered. Strictly business.

“Come on in.”

He stepped back and gestured me through the small foyer into a single fifteen-by-fifteen room barely large enough for a neatly made double bed, a trunk serving as a bedside table, a small desk with a laptop computer on it, and an old-fashioned wooden desk chair. One huge sidewalk-level window cast light on the newspapers, photographs, and correspondence that covered just about every horizontal surface. To the right was a cramped galley kitchen, off the foyer was a bathroom, and there was a single closet off the main room. Apartment life in the big city.

“Have a seat; make yourself comfortable,” said my host, gathering newspapers off the bed and stashing them in a recycling bin under the desk.

Zachary sank into the desk chair.

I perched on the edge of the bed, feeling awkward at the implied intimacy. As in the exterior hallway, the walls of the apartment were paneled in a beautiful cherry wainscoting that reached at least five feet. The wall surface above was chock-full of tacked-up black-and-white photographs: faces mostly, a lot of children. I don’t know much about photography, but these shots were beautiful, soulful. The plate-rail ledge displayed brightly beaded handicrafts, carved figurines, and woven baskets. Mementoes of a rich life.

The decorations reminded me of the apartments of my friends back in the anthropology program, or my own room for that matter—where every item had a story attached, rather than being picked out by a designer, as was the case in most of the wealthy homes I worked on.

“So what can I help you with?” asked my host.

“I wanted to ask you some more questions about the party the other night.”

“I thought you were a contractor.”

“I am.”

“So how come you’re acting like a cop?”

“Have they spoken to you yet?”

He nodded. “Yesterday. Why are
you
looking into it?”

“I’m just trying to find out what happened,” I evaded. “Matt’s a friend.”

“A ‘friend’? You had a crush on him when you were young, right?” Zach teased with a crooked smile. “Tell the truth.”

“I was there when—when we found Kenneth. It’s a hard image to shake.”

“Ah. I see.”

“Matt Addax is incapable of killing his friend with a nail gun and a saw. Think about it. You know him.”

“I do, a bit.” Zach nodded. His hands were clasped around one knee, and he observed me with a sort of relaxed but astute mien. This went on for a long moment. Just as I was starting to get nervous, he continued. “So you think you can tell, just like that? What evil lurks in the hearts of men?”

“Not just like that, but I trust my gut.” Did I? Trusting my gut had led me to marry the wrong man. But that was romance; this was friendship. I had always had good taste in friends.

“You want some orange juice? Vitamin water?” Zach asked.

“No, thanks.”

“So, I used to trust my gut,” Zach continued with our previous conversation as he rose and stepped into the galley kitchen. “Then I spent some time in Darfur—all over Sudan, actually. After what I saw there, I decided I don’t know much about how far people will go, given the right motivation.”

He poured himself a tall glass of orange juice and put the carton back in the fridge. His words had been casual, as though recounting his trip to the mall. But as he turned back toward me, his eyes held mine. Eyes far too old for his face. Eyes that did not quite reflect his boyish smile.

I couldn’t think what to say.

“Anyhoo, you want to look at the pictures—is that it?”

“Do you have them already?”

“At an event like that, I shoot digital. Instant gratification.” He swung his chair around to face his computer and started clicking.