“Property Section performed a routine check of the serial number, and ascertained that the weapon was registered as the personal property of LAPD officer Roy Frady, and had been reported stolen.”
The last notation on the report showed that Frady’s two-inch had been turned over to the FBI the day after it was identified. After telling the camera all that, I stepped out of the frame so that Guido could film background.
The air temp was 103 degrees, and we hadn’t even had breakfast yet.
Guido and I had begged space on a weekend gambler’s special flight from L.A.—the earliest plane leaving LAX for Vegas—and had been met at the airport by Darl Incledon just after dawn.
I was thinking about stretching out under the puny cotton-wood on the easement when Darl drove up with sodas from the drive-through burger stand around the corner. I walked over and met her at the curb.
“I called Mrs. Allsworthy,” Darl said, extracting herself from the rental Geo. “She’ll see you, but she says she only barely remembers turning in the gun. It’s been a long time.”
“We’ll go see if we can prod her memory with a little cash; I don’t have time to fool around with her.” I accepted a jumbo Coke from Darl. “I’m booked on a noon flight to Oakland. I have an appointment there that I don’t want to miss.”
Darl, looking fresh in a white pique dress, reached up and smoothed the collar of my blue shirt. “We get up on the wrong side of the bed today?”
“We got up on the wrong side of the sunrise,” I said. I held the cold cup to the side of my face. “Did you have trouble getting the report?”
“Piece of cake.” She preened, justifiably. “I’ve done a lot of work in this city—all the construction going on, there’s a lot of equipment moving in and out. I just mined some of my local police contacts, called in a debt, bought a few drinks. Wouldn’t have taken as long as it did, except the report’s so old it was in storage. Too bad there isn’t more to it.”
“Too bad,” I agreed. “Were you able to find out how the FBI got into the picture?”
She shook her head. “When you brought that up, I called and asked my man. There’s nothing in the report. He suggested that the FBI had a flag on the gun and when the inquiry was made, the Feds swept in and took possession—interstate crime. There are no names and no receipt. All the notation says is that the gun was handed over to the local federal field office.”
“The FBI agent who gave me the tip about the gun also said that it was a dead end.” I shook the ice in the cup. “It has been my experience that sometimes when you come to a dead end, there’s still some usable road on the other side.”
“God, it’s fun to work with you again.” Darl laughed, her dark eyes sparkling. “If I stopped at half the dead ends I run into, I’d never get anywhere. Hell with ’em, huh?”
Guido joined us. “Can we eat now?”
I looked at my watch and said, “Not yet.”
The only shade around Mrs. Anita Allsworthy’s single-wide trailer was provided by the rotting canvas cabana attached to the side. We had to stay outside, she said, because her place inside was a mess. I didn’t try to argue with her, even though there was a swamp cooler hanging from her window. If the yard was more presentable than the house, then I didn’t want to go in, air-cooled or not. From the appearance of her tiny yard, she had brought more than a little of her dead husband’s junk with her: cannibalized appliances, torn and broken pieces of furniture, boxes and boxes of old magazines, waist-high stacks of trash right up to the lot line.
Guido took off his white T-shirt and soaked it under the leaky garden hose. Then he draped the shirt over his head and shoulders before he picked up the camera. The desert landscape beyond the cabana shimmered with silvery heat, and he fussed about what the temperature was doing to the surface of his videotape while Mrs. Allsworthy and I cleared some space and set up two folding chairs.
I sat next to Mrs. Allsworthy with a cup of ice held clamped between my thighs, dodging the arrows of bright light that pierced the holey cabana, arrows that shifted with the breeze. When we arrived, the thermometer on the side of her trailer said the shade was 108 degrees. Fifteen minutes later, when we began talking, it was 110 and climbing.
“When my husband died, I had to sell the business.” Mrs. Allsworthy picked at the hairnet covering her tight, white curls. “I guess that gun had been in his things for some time. I don’t know how he got it.”
“Why did you take the gun to the police?” I asked, full profile to Guido’s camera.
Enunciating clearly, looking directly into the camera, Mrs. Allsworthy said, “I turned in the gun because it’s the law.” But she sounded as if she were reading from a script memorized for some old school recital: “For I cannot tell a lie, Father.” The answer was too correct for me to buy, and I had come too far to be nice about it.
I guessed her age to be eighty-something, but didn’t ask. When we knocked on her door at eight, she was already dressed for the day and was watering her cactus garden; her industry was a measure, I thought, of her general state of being. She was pleasant enough when talking about her grandchildren, but questions about her husband made her shy and defensive.
I tried again. “Guido and I stopped at the site of your junkyard. When did they build the mall?”
“It’s been some time.” She looked out across the desert as if Lester’s place might still be out there to give her some answers. “Ten years? Maybe a dozen. That mall is a darn sight prettier than Lester’s junkyard ever was.”
I said, “Tell me about your husband’s business.”
“It was just like any other junkyard.” She dabbed at her powdered cheeks with a paper napkin. “Sold spare parts and what-have-you.”
“How did he acquire his stock?” I asked.
“His stock?” She laughed. “You mean, his junk.”
“Whatever.”
“He’d go out and find it on the street. Or people would bring him things to trade or to sell. Finding the junk wasn’t the problem; finding someone to buy it was.”
“Did he regularly buy and sell firearms?”
“No,” she said, putting up her guard. “Lester kept a few guns for his own protection. But he wasn’t a dealer. He didn’t have a license for that. Couldn’t afford one.”
I sat closer to her, saw Guido tighten the focus. “How did Lester come into possession of Roy Frady’s gun?”
“I couldn’t say.” She gazed off across the desert. “Of course, that little gun wasn’t the only one I turned in that day. There was a Luger and a couple shotguns, too.”
Mrs. Allsworthy also said she didn’t remember whether she had ever met the motel managers that hid Patty Hearst. But twenty years is a long time to remember.
Darl drove Guido and me over to the Federal Building. Like nearly everything east of downtown, the building was newer than my story. I got nowhere with the field agent who agreed to speak with me, or with the media liaison I was shunted to. Even Darl batted zero with the Feds. Racketeering, fixed games, and money laundering were one thing. An old story about a dead L.A. cop was nothing. She promised to stay at it.
I left Las Vegas with what I thought was some interesting footage, and a puzzle with too many missing pieces. More than anything else, I was sick of being lied to.
CHAPTER
17
I flew into Oakland and took the BART to Berkeley.
Like Las Vegas, the town of Berkeley is always a street circus, but the shows are radically different. While Vegas is glitz and glitter, Berkeley is a more or less harmonious mix of leftover hippie street vendors, suit-and-tie yuppies who commute across the bridge into San Francisco, and legions of students all sharing available space.
Shattuck Avenue, Telegraph Avenue, Bancroft Way, the main streets around the campus, were abuzz with activity when I arrived on that very warm Friday; Cal was only a couple of weeks into its fall quarter. I walked among the crowd, happy, hearing a street refrain as familiar and beloved as my fath
er’s off-key lullabies.
My favorite group at the beginning of the school year is always the freshmen. They arrive during the week before classes, honor-grad paragons of their communities, the hope of the future delivered to the Big U in family station wagons with their names sewn into their underwear—just like summer camp. By the time they go home for Thanksgiving, their new clothes are all the same dull red-gray because who has time to sort the wash? Their hair untrimmed, with heads full of halflearned curriculum to fuel their half-baked opinions, they are cocked to deliver a full-on assault on everything their parents hold dear. By the end of May, after their third round of finals, they will be either academic washouts or reborn paragons.
The air was warm, but compared to the desert I had just left, it was balmy. I stopped at Fruity Rudy’s for a fresh fruit slush, just to have an excuse to linger and watch the parade pass by. The cup was overfull. I took off my linen jacket and carried it over my shoulder, holding the rapidly melting slush out front to keep it from dripping all over my shirt. After two long sips, I gave up, tossed the mess into the trash, and walked on.
My sister’s nursing home was on the northwest side of campus, less than half a mile from the house where I grew up. I walked up Shattuck, intending to take the shortest route across campus, maybe stop in at the physics department and say hello to old friends. But I had lots of time, so I made a detour and walked up Benevenue at the southern edge of campus, stopped in front of 2603, the house from which Patty Hearst was kidnapped.
The cedar siding dated the fourplex where Patty had lived, but it was still nice. Still far beyond the budget of the vast majority of students, and probably young faculty as well.
I could understand how Patty’s comfort might foster resentment among the disadvantaged, or, for the loosely wrapped, maybe stir up rage. Except that, Patty’s kidnappers were neither poor nor crazy. They were, like her, pampered children of the upper middle class. Honor-roll students. College grads.
The neighborhood was very quiet. When Patty Hearst fought her kidnappers and screamed out in the night, the neighbors were no more helpful than the neighbors around 122 West Eighty-ninth Street had been the night Roy Frady died. Similar method of operation in both cases, both marked with similar cynical brazenness: go ahead and scream because no one’s going to help you.
I felt a chill just imagining her terror. As I walked onto campus, I stayed to the path, stayed with the crowd. I kept checking behind me.
Campus was cooler than town. The ancient redwoods that shade the grounds were like a deep green canopy high overhead. Among them, oaks and sycamores were beginning to turn pale yellow and soft orange against the green. Bright leaves littered the ground. Even in that very quiet and peaceful place, I still felt spooked.
I walked up Strawberry Creek, which bisects the heart of the massive school, breathing in the scented woods, and came out on Grizzly Peak, where my parents live. The nursing home was straight down the hill.
Mother had told me about the pickets. I expected a few signs, maybe a news van. I was surprised to see a crowd that numbered probably a hundred souls. I steeled myself, wondered whether it was too late to find a disguise of some sort, but walked straight into the fray.
The purpose of any picket is to get media attention. The organizers of this demonstration were notorious opportunists, and were very skillful manipulators of the press. The press knows this, but is not deterred.
There were two news vans in place when I rounded the corner, and a third arrived before I was halfway up the block.
A woman with a born-again bouffant-do waved a Save Emily sign in my face. If a camera hadn’t been poised for just such an encounter, I would have decked her. At that point I seemed to be unrecognized as a member of the evil Duchamps family that wanted to pull Em’s plug, so I decided to wait until I was on my way out before I hit anyone. Otherwise, I might never get inside.
I refused to make eye contact with the picketers who chanted at me as I walked toward the front door. When an old man reached out and tapped my shoulder, I turned, ready to glare him down.
“Hi, honey,” he said. The sign he waved exhorted, Save the Fishdarter. It took me a second, I was so caught off guard, to recognize this rabble-rouser as August Perlmutter, professor of nuclear physics, emeritus, and my father’s longtime office mate.
Standing next to him, in a soft pink faculty wife twinset, was Mrs. Perlmutter, my mother’s best friend. Her sign proclaimed, The Aliens Are Among Us. It’s Time for NASA to Tell the Truth. Mrs. Perlmutter’s tennies matched her sweaters. She winked at me and marched on down the easement waving her sign, cutting off a Save Emily picket as a camera focused in on it.
I walked a few steps behind her, greeted in very private ways by Mother and Dad’s trio sonata group, their bridge partners, their colleagues, former students, and neighbors. Each of them seemed to have given up all reason: Nixon Was Right. Legalize Cannabis. Che Guevara Died for Your Sins.
Celibacy Is the Only Answer, was held aloft by Freda Walsh, age eighty-two. As I passed her, she jiggled her picket and said, sotto voce, “Don’t believe it, sweetie.”
In all, I estimate that the Save Em’ers were outnumbered four to one. And outmaneuvered at every turn. No news-gathering organization, confronted with this gathering of apparent flakes, would take anyone there seriously. The counterdemonstration was the sweetest expression of friendship I had ever seen.
I laughed all the way up the steps and down the sterile hospital corridor. My mood changed to one of concern as soon as I walked into Emily’s room and saw my parents. Both of them were gray with fatigue.
“Who organized the demonstration?” I asked, kissing both in turn.
“Your mother,” Dad said. “The woman watches too much football: the best defense is a good offense.”
“I suppose someone is having a potluck as soon as the newspeople go away,” I said.
“At the Perlmutters.” Mother smiled. “We invited the news folks to come, too. Just a light lunch.”
I said, “Oh, Mom,” because there was nothing else to say.
When I came in, I had interrupted my father’s pacing in the narrow space between the end of my sister Emily’s bed and the door. When I was seated on the end of Em’s bed and out of his way, he started up again.
Dad is six foot five, all legs and loose-hinged arms, so there was a fair amount of shin and elbow banging, as there always is with Dad, as he maneuvered from one side of the room to the other.
Dad said, “The issue is, Now what? What instructions are we prepared to give the hospital in case Emily goes into crisis?”
“What have you two discussed so far?” I asked.
“Only this,” Dad said. “The final decision has to be yours, Maggie. Ultimately, you will be left with the consequences. Your mother and I both have already exceeded our allotted three score and ten. If we authorize mechanical intervention to bring Emily out of a crisis, then we must be prepared for Emily to live, on support, for another thirty or forty years—entirely within the range of possibility considering her age and overall health. She could so easily outlive your mother and me, darling Margot, that you will be left, alone, saddled with the ramifications.”
“Mother?” I said, appealing for some help. My mother was giving my sister Emily her weekly manicure and scarcely glanced up.
“I get it,” I said. “You two are arguing over this and you want me to be the swing vote.”
“We aren’t arguing.” Mother flexed Emily’s long fingers, massaged them with lotion. “How can we argue when we aren’t speaking?”
I looked from the black scowl on my father’s lined face to the imperious cool on my mother’s. Compromise, the great strength of their fifty-year relationship, had failed them where the issue was the survival, however elemental, of my sister Emily. Mother and Dad had presented me with a dilemma worthy of Solomon, and abandoned me.
I couldn’t expect much help from other family members, either. After a failed two-day furlough
to visit Em, my uncle Max was back at the Betty Ford Center, drying out, screwing aging, alcoholic movie stars. My nephew Marc was off on a postgraduate tramp around the globe—he wouldn’t reach his next contact point for two weeks. I still had the counsel of my daughter and Mike, and in her way, my sister Emily.
When I was a little girl in a fix, I would go climb under the covers with my big sister and talk things over with her. That’s what I was remembering when I sat down on the end of her hard hospital bed.
“So, Emily,” I said, nostalgic for her wisdom. “You’re the doctor in the family. It’s your life we’re deciding here. Give me some input.”
Emily said nothing, as she had said nothing for over two years.
I took hold of her top leg as the therapist had taught us, firmly pulled it a few degrees straighter, massaged the calf muscles that were as stiff and stringy as beef jerky, pulled some more. It seemed to me that every time I put her through this drill, there was less flesh, more resistance. Never a response.
Emily was fed and drained by tubes, artificially kept in chemical equilibrium. For two years she had managed to take care of the crucial functions all by herself, to breathe, to keep her heart beating. My entire family had agreed after the shooting, as soon as we realized that Emily was not ever going to recover any mental function, that no artificial life-support would be employed, no resuscitation would be offered.
So, for two years, Emily had hung in, lying in nearly the same position in a variety of hospital and nursing home beds, her body slowly coiling in on itself, her continuing health rapidly bankrupting the family.
The weird thing was that two years ago all of us agreed that there would be no heroic intervention if Emily stopped functioning on her own. Brilliant Emily without a functional brain was, for us, a corpse. Then, oddly, over time, we had grown accustomed to Emily as she had become. We loved her, talked to her, adjusted family routines around her. In some ways, in fact, we needed her. But did that mean that the decision about heroics had changed for any, or all, of us?
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