Read Online There's Nothing to Be Afraid Of by Marcia Muller - Free Book Online Page A

in gaudy finery, others in rags—went about their business or stood on corners waiting for it to materialize. Shabby men, their collars turned up against the biting cold, hustled along the pavement or leaned against buildings, panhandling. Winos clutched their paper-encased bottles as if they were their last fading hopes. From the bars came blaring music and drunken laughter; from the restaurants came the odor of grease, faintly underscored by the street smells of garbage and urine.
    The door of the Globe was unlocked. I hurried inside, grateful for the first rush of warm air, then stopped in surprise. On the counter where Sallie Hyde’s fake Christmas tree had stood was a small Scotch pine in a red-and-green pot. It was covered with handcrafted ornaments of the kind found in specialty stores, and an ornate gold star crowned its tip. A heavy metal chain wound around the pot. I crossed the lobby and followed the chain down behind the reception desk to where it was padlocked to one of the upright supports. Someone was taking no chances.
    And rightly so: live Christmas trees did not come cheap. I knew that from pricing them. Nor did the kind of ornaments this one was festooned with. Who, I wondered, had dispensed such largesse?
    I went over to the door of Mary Zemanek’s apartment and knocked, but received no answer. The rest of the hotel was similarly quiet, although I could hear a radio playing and a baby crying in the apartments beyond the ground-floor fire door. It was after ten-thirty, and Carolyn hadn’t arrived yet, but she’d said she might be late when I’d talked to her earlier. In her absence, I decided to reinvestigate the basement; I hadn’t given it a thorough going-over that morning, and it had occurred to me that I might have missed a hiding place.
    I was carrying a paper sack containing the olive-green sheet I’d found down there that morning, and for a moment I debated leaving it behind the reception desk. Then I decided to keep it with me and tucked it securely under my arm as I went through the fire door. As I passed down the corridor, the baby’s crying became louder. A woman’s harsh voice was raised in what I was coming to recognize as the nasal syllables of Vietnamese, and then the kind of frantic music that usually accompanies TV car chases flared up. The child either stopped crying or else its wails were drowned out by the television. I shrugged, thinking that every parent has his own way of dealing with these things.
    Inside the stairwell, the single bulb glowed dully, the green walls reflecting it murkily. I flicked the switch by the door and saw a shaft of light shine on the stairs that led to the basement. Standing still, I listened to the roar of the furnace below. The sheet of paper that Mrs. Vang had given me listing the frightening incidents hadn’t shown times for them, just dates. But now I realized the noises in the basement would have to have been confined to those hours when the furnace wasn’t in operation: otherwise, the residents couldn’t possibly have heard them.
    That was good, because it probably meant whoever was causing the trouble had entered the building during the daylight hours, when someone was likely to have seen him. Probably, I’d have to check the times the noises had occurred—if anyone remembered—and also the schedule for running the furnace.
    I started down the stairway, my hand on the metal railing. Halfway to the landing, I heard a click, and then the furnace quit. Apparently it was on a thermostat and switched off when the area around it reached optimal temperature, whatever that was. And, unfortunately, that fact negated my new theory. Still, it would be a good idea to try to pinpoint the times of the various incidents and then canvass the neighborhood, asking if anyone had seen a stranger entering the hotel.
    Now there was another faulty theory, I thought, as I rounded the corner on the landing. Why was I so sure the culprit was a stranger? Perhaps