Read Tales of the City 04 - Babycakes for Free Online

looking more like the Little Woman than Michael had ever seen her look. When her gaze met Michael’s for a split second, she seemed to sense his puzzlement. “This place is great,” she said far too breezily. “We should all be sworn to secrecy.”
“Too late,” he replied, parrying her diversionary tactic with one of his own. “Look who just walked in.”
Both Mary Ann and Brian jerked their heads toward the door.
“Not now!” he whispered.
Mary Ann mugged at him. “You said to look.”
“It’s Theresa Cross,” he muttered, “with one of those fags from Atari.”
“Jesus,” said Brian. “Bix Cross’s widow?”
“You got it.”
“She’s on all his album covers,” said Brian.
“Parts of her,” amended Mary Ann. Brian leered. “Right.”
A cloud of confusion passed over Mrs. Madrigal’s face. “Her husband was a singer?”
“You know,” said Michael. “The rock star.”
“Ah.”
“She wrote My Life with Bix, ” Mary Ann added. “She lives in Hillsborough near the Halcyons.”
The landlady’s eyes widened. “Well, my dears, she appears to be coming this way.”
Michael assessed the leggy figure striding toward their table. There were probably no twigs lodged within the dark recesses of her hair, but the careful disarray of her hoyden-in-the-haystack hairdo was clearly meant to suggest that there might be. That and her red Plasticine fingernails were all he could absorb before the rock widow had descended on them in a sickly-sweet aura of Ivoire. “You!” she all but shouted. “You I want to talk to.”
The crimson talon was pointing at Mary Ann.
Clearing her throat, Mary Ann said: “Yes?”
“You are the best,” crowed Theresa Cross. “The best, the best, the best!”
Mary Ann reddened noticeably. “Thank you very much.”
“I watch you all the time. You’re Mary Jane Singleton.”
“Mary Ann.”
Mrs. Cross couldn’t be bothered. “That hat was the best. The best, the best, the best. Who are these cute people? Why don’t you introduce us?”
“Uh … sure. This is my husband, Brian … and my friends Michael Tolliver and Anna Madrigal.”
The rock widow nodded three times without a word, apparently regarding her own name as a matter of public knowledge. Then she turned her gypsy gaze back to Mary Ann. “You’re coming to my auction, aren’t you?”
So that was it, thought Michael. Mrs. Cross could smell media across a crowded room.
Mary Ann was thrown off balance, as intended. “Your …? I’m afraid I don’t …”
“Oh, no!” The rock widow showed the whites of her eyes, simulating exasperation. “Don’t tell me my ditzy secretary didn’t send you an invitation!”
Mary Ann shrugged. “I guess not.”
“Well … consider yourself invited. I’m having an auction out at my house this weekend. Some of Bix’s memorabilia. Gold records. The shirts he wore on his last tour. Lots of stuff. Fun stuff.”
“Great,” said Mary Ann.
“Oh … and his favorite Harley … and his barbells.” The moving finger pointed in Brian’s direction. “This one looks like he works out a little. Why don’t you bring him along?”
Mary Ann shot a quick glance at “this one,” then turned back to her assailant. “I’m not sure if we have plans that day, but if …”
“W is coming for sure, and the Hollywood Reporter has promised me they’ll be there. Even Dr. Noguchi is coming … which strikes me as the very least he could do, since he was the one who broke the story when Bix … you know … bit the big one.”
Michael listened with a mixture of fascination and revulsion. It was this kind of candid banter that had earned Theresa Cross a rung of her very own on San Francisco’s social ladder. She might be a little common at times, but she was anything but boring. Besides, her husband’s death (from a heroin overdose at the Tropicana Motel in Hollywood) had left her a very rich woman.
Whenever local hostesses needed an “extra woman”—as they often did in San