A Death in California

by Barthel, Joan;

  Hope liked Vanessa. When Hope was escorted into the cell Wednesday night, there were just the two of them in a cell with eight bunks and a toilet. But Vanessa explained that the cell would fill up over the weekend, when the hookers and junkies were rounded up, and she suggested that Hope take a lot of blankets before then, because later there wouldn’t be enough to go around. In fact, Vanessa helped Hope pick out some of the best blankets, though they all had holes in them, Hope noticed.

  “What’s she in for, Vanessa?” a woman yelled from down the corridor. Nobody could see into anybody else’s cell, but everybody seemed to know what was going on.

  “Oh, leave her alone,” Vanessa yelled back. “She’s sick.”

  Some of the women on the floor were waiting to go to court; others were serving sentences. Vanessa told Hope she’d been in jail for two months, on a charge of stealing a car, and was waiting to talk to a public defender. She said she’d been working for a woman who was an alcoholic, taking care of the woman’s children, without salary but with room and board and sometimes the use of the woman’s car. Vanessa said she’d asked the woman if she could take the car and drive down to L.A. to visit her sister, that the woman had said okay and then had put out a stolen car warrant on her.

  Vanessa was so friendly that Hope talked to her a lot.

  Even with the extra blankets, Hope was freezing, even wearing the socks and the sweatshirt over her gown. She’d hardly slept. The woman down the end of the hall had screamed and vomited all night, the overhead lights glared all night, and, three times during the night, a guard strode down the corridor, running a gun over the bars on the cells, calling each inmate’s name, over and over: “Vanessa! Answer me! Vanessa! Hope! Hope! Hope!”

  The first time this happened, Hope sat up on her bunk, terrified, her heart pounding, but Vanessa told her not to worry about it, that the guards were just checking to make sure everybody was still alive. Once in a while, somebody managed to commit suicide; and not long before, she was told, a woman who had been brought in with broken ribs had screamed all night and been found dead in her cell in the morning; a rib had punctured her lung.

  Only one good thing had happened Wednesday night, though at first it didn’t seem good at all. Hope was sitting on the edge of her bunk, talking to Vanessa, when someone came and said, “Come on, your lawyer’s here.” Hope followed the guard into the corridor, down to the end, where she saw Tom Breslin standing with another man. She glanced at Tom, then stared at the man with him. He was huge. Not fat, but very big and muscular. He wore two or three diamond rings and a diamond bracelet. He looked very smooth and very menacing; to Hope, he looked exactly the way a Mafia hit man would look, so she turned, without saying a word, and ran back to her cell, where she huddled on the far end of the bunk.

  She was brought out again and taken to a small, windowless room, where Tom and the big man were sitting, smoking. Again Hope shrank back. “It’s okay,” Tom told her, as he introduced Gene Tinch, a private detective whom Ned Nelsen had called in on the case.

  “I’m dying for a cigarette,” Hope said. Tom handed her a pack of Luckies, and soon the three of them were enveloped in smoke, talking.

  Tom looked a wreck. After driving up from Los Angeles, he’d been driving all over Tulare County, getting what he called “the runaround” from the local authorities. At the District Attorney’s office in Visalia, where he’d asked to see the arrest reports, he’d been told they were in Porterville. Nobody could tell him how to get to Porterville. When he found out—it was nearly an hour’s drive—and got there, he was told the reports were at Visalia. Or, if not there, maybe at the printer’s, being photocopied. When he and Gene tried to scout around at the ranch, they were turned away. But Tom told Hope not to worry, that they were checked into a nearby motel and he’d see her in the morning.

  “Did you call Porterville this afternoon, looking for me?” Hope asked, remembering the calls she’d heard when she was in the dirty toilet, hearing someone say, “Hope Masters isn’t here.” When Tom said he hadn’t called, Hope knew who the caller must have been.

  Tom had heard only part of the long story from Hope at the Beverly Hills jail. Now she developed it further, but basically it was the same story of an intruder in the night, a man with a goatee, possibly Mexican, and the man who had rescued her, the man named Taylor.

  “Try to get some rest,” Tom told Hope. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Would you bring me some cigarettes?” Hope asked.

  “Sure,” Tom said. “And by the way, don’t talk to your roommate. They could use her against you in court.”

  Very early on Thursday—Hope wasn’t sure when, without clocks or windows—there was a tremendous, deafening noise, the slammer: forty cell doors being yanked open simultaneously and, when the women had stepped out into the corridor, being simultaneously slammed shut. At breakfast, she was given a spoon—no knife or fork—and an enormous amount of food: oatmeal, eggs, bacon, toast, pancakes, and coffee. Hope still had bad cramps; she was nauseated. “Oh, God, I can’t eat any of this,” she said to the trustee. “Could I just have a glass of milk?” The trustee said no milk in jail, and Hope didn’t argue. She was afraid of the trustee, a short, squat woman who looked part Indian. Vanessa told Hope that trustees didn’t get that job depending on how much they could be trusted, but depending on the length of their sentences. The short, squat woman was serving six months for permitting child abuse; her boyfriend had mutilated the sex organs of the woman’s three-year-old son.

  By 5:30 A.M., everybody was dressed and fed and the scrubbing was finished. There was nothing more to do. The trustees had TV sets and radios and sewing machines in their cells, but in the day cell used by the rest of the women, with eight benches bolted to the floor, and one table, there were no books or magazines, no TV, only one jigsaw puzzle on the table. Vanessa was doing the puzzle, and Hope started to work on it, until it occurred to her that Vanessa might not get another puzzle for a while and she probably wouldn’t want to finish it real fast. So Hope went back to one of the other benches and just sat there. Down the hall, someone had set a fire in a cell; a few women were scooping water out of the toilets in their cells and talking through the pipes to the men on the floor below. Hope just sat there, waiting, listening, reading the graffiti over the toilet in the day room. She thought it interesting that although a lot of the women had started the morning by yelling “Fuck!” back and forth, the graffiti was quite different. One scrawl said, “I got out and you will too.” Another was, “God is everywhere—even here.”

  Like most of the sheriff’s men, Sgt. Vern Hensley did whatever job needed doing; Tulare County had only twenty-two adult felony investigators, and a situation like this one put a strain on the manpower. He had helped with the autopsy; he arranged for Pat Tomlinson of the M & W Flying Service in Porterville to take aerial photographs of the ranch from a helicopter. Mostly, though, Vern Hensley worked with evidence, specializing in fingerprints. He had been with the Tulare County Sheriff’s Office for fourteen years, in charge of the crime lab for thirteen. Just after noon, Sergeant Hensley got a copy of a driver’s license bearing the name and the right thumbprint of a William Thomas Ashlock, from Lt. Forrest Barnes. He compared the thumbprint on the license with the thumbprint of the decedent and concluded they were identical.

  Other deputies and detectives had been at the ranch continuously since Tuesday night, searching it or guarding it or both. Sheriff’s men had sealed off the property; Jim Webb, Teresa, and the kids had moved down to Porterville, to Jim’s mother’s.

  At the Porterville substation, Detective Jack Flores interviewed Jim’s thirty-two-year-old brother, Gerald Ray. He asked Mr. Webb to tell him what he knew of the incident at the ranch, in his own words. Gerald said he worked swing shift at Sperry Rand and was a minister of the Free Will Baptist Church in Orange Cove. He told how, on Saturday, he and his other brother and their families had gone from their mother’s house to the ranch where Jim lived
, to see the cattle and take some color slides and let the kids see the newborn calves. As the whole group, four adults and three children, was leaving the ranch to drive back into town, Gerald saw a gentleman in his late twenties, with dark curly hair, medium build, olive complexion, in a green Chevy Vega. The man asked the Webbs who they were. When Gerald told him, the man asked if any of them could saddle a horse. They told him no, but that Jim would be off work after three and would probably be up at the ranch then.

  Gerald said he saw a two-tone Lincoln Continental behind the Vega, but he didn’t get a good look at the man in it.

  Back in Porterville, when Jim got home from his job at the state hospital, Gerald told him there was somebody at the ranch waiting to get a horse saddled. Jim asked Gerald if he’d like to drive up with him, so Gerald went along in Jim’s car, which he thought was a late-model Mercedes-Benz.

  When Gerald and Jim arrived at the ranch, Gerald saw both cars again but he didn’t see any people. Jim looked for the key to the tack shed to get a saddle, and couldn’t find it. Gerald said Jim told him somebody had just broke into the shed a week or so ago and stole some saddles. Gerald asked Jim if they couldn’t just pull the hinge off the door, but Jim said no, he had fixed it back to where it wouldn’t pull off very easily. They tried to get in the back window, but couldn’t. So he called over to the main house to tell them.

  While Jim was in the house calling, Gerald stayed out in the yard, where he saw two men and a girl looking through the orange grove. Gerald saw the one gentleman he had seen previously—dark curly hair, in his late twenties, medium build—and he saw another man, bigger, about six feet, maybe 185 pounds, very well-dressed, with the new type of sunglasses that look like they change colors with the light of the sun. He had a very fancy pipe, kind of a Sherlock Holmes pipe, and seemed well-mannered. He had long brown hair—not extremely long, not like a hippie—wavy but not curly, the way you fix hair with a hot comb.

  The other man, the smaller man, was about five foot eight or five foot nine; his dark hair was curly but not really kinky, more like the hair of an Italian fellow Gerald knew. Gerald said that man did not have a mustache and he thought the girl called him “Bob,” but he wasn’t positive. He did notice her attitude toward that man, though; it seemed to Gerald like she treated him like a valet or something, but the other fellow she treated more or less as a dignitary, because later on, when the horse wanted to eat grass and wouldn’t move, Gerald said the girl said to the curly-haired fellow, kind of snotty like, “Here, you take her, that’s what you’re here for, anyhow.” Then the bigger fellow just went over and got the horse and led the horse off. And just as they were all getting to the edge of the trees, Terry Webb and Gerald’s wife came driving up in the Dodge, and the girl yelled something at Terry. Gerald thought the girl was just acting like, well, I’m the boss here, you’ll do what I want you to do.

  Jim went over to the main house, and when he came back, he told Gerald they were all drinking over there, and a little later he said something else, something about the affluent society. Gerald himself thought the girl was acting like she had been drinking or taking some kind of a drug. She wasn’t acting normal, because Gerald remembered one statement she made when she and the two men were coming down from the pasture toward where he and Jim were standing; she was saying something about getting stoned and then sitting down in the middle of a river and listening to the kids laugh. Gerald thought it was weird.

  Gerald said that while Jim was getting a knife to cut off a rope for the horse, the girl was talking, more or less bragging, about the movie actors she had been around. Gerald thought the curly-haired fellow looked like he had been drinking, or was on drugs or something; not completely incoherent, but not really with it. In other words, he wasn’t alert and bright and he said very little. Gerald said the girl was definitely more attracted to the brown-haired fellow, the fellow that was supposed to be from the newspaper, than to the other one.

  Gerald said the fellow with the pipe seemed like an educated man, a very likable individual. It sure seemed to Gerald like the girl was trying to impress him, and he didn’t seem like he was too impressed. Gerald said she asked the fellow, “Will this be all right, without a saddle?” and he had said, “That will be fine.” It did seem to Gerald that the fellow had come up to get a picture. It seemed sincere to Gerald, not like there was anything wrong in that regard at all.

  Gerald said he had said to Jim, on the way up, “This must be some kind of a dude that you have to come up and saddle their horses for them.” And he made some comment like, “Do you have to help them up on their horses, too?” When they’d passed the cars, Gerald had looked, because he just liked to see what kind of cars people had, and he thought the big car was a Cadillac but Jim said, “No, it’s a Continental.”

  Sometime during the afternoon, Jim and Gerald drove on up behind the ranch, because Jim wanted to show Gerald a place where cattle could have gotten through the fence. Two people were fishing out in the pond. Jim told Gerald to go ahead of him, while he went up to the lake to see who they were.

  When the Webbs all left the ranch, on the way out, around the second bend in the road, they met the Lincoln coming back up the road with its lights on. There were three people in it, and Gerald just presumed they were the same three he had seen before. Jim backed up his car, and the Lincoln came on ahead and stopped for a minute, and someone said, “Thank you, Jim.” And that’s the last Gerald knew about anything.

  “There’s one little thing I’m concerned with, and this is in regard to the deceased,” Detective Flores told Gerald. “As near as I can remember in your conversation here, this fellow in his late twenties—five foot eight, about one hundred seventy or one hundred seventy-five pounds, olive complexion, dark curly hair and no mustache, now, could you have been mistaken at all that he had dark curly hair and no mustache?”

  “I know I’m not mistaken about the curly hair and I usually—well, as many people that have mustaches today, I usually notice it,” Gerald replied. “And I definitely don’t remember a mustache. I really don’t.”

  “In other words, you were that close to him that if he would have had a trace of one, you would have noticed it?”

  “Yes, I believe I would have noticed it,” Gerald said. “I know he didn’t have a full mustache. He may have—now, when my brother first mentioned that he had a mustache, I thought, well, maybe he could have had one starting, but when he said a full mustache, no, no way.”

  “Would you have any objections if I took you to the chapel and let you see this body?” Flores asked.

  “No, wouldn’t have any objections at all,” Gerald said.

  “In other words, you have no reason to hesitate or say, well, I don’t care to see him or to identify him? In other words, you would be going out there to view him of your own free will?”

  “Yes sir,” Gerald said.

  Twenty minutes later, Gerald Webb and Detective Flores were at the funeral home, with Carson Dykes of the funeral home staff standing by. Detective Flores talked into his tape recorder.

  “The time is four-thirty P.M. At this time we’re at the Myers Funeral Chapel where we’re about to uncover the deceased’s face and head so Mr. Webb can look at it and tell if it’s the same subject that he seen at the ranch.

  “Mr. Webb, would you kind of take a look at this fellow here and tell me if this is the same fellow you seen at the ranch?”

  “Let me go around on the other side to make sure,” Gerald said. “Would you move that down just a little bit from right there.” Carson Dykes moved the sheet a little. “No, it does not look to be the same individual that I saw at the ranch at all,” Gerald said.

  “Would you speak up a little bit, please?” Flores asked.

  “No, this does not look like the same—either of the individuals I saw at the ranch on Saturday, February 24, 1973.”

  Jack Flores paused. “Well, tell me, Mr. Webb, what makes you think this—any of the characteristics you could
point out?”

  “The hair doesn’t—the gentleman, the one gentleman that I—was of this build and had darker hair and it was more curly and I can’t remember him having a mustache at all, and this fellow here has a mustache.”

  “All right,” Flores said. “How about his facial features—that is, maybe the forehead and the mouth and cheeks and nose?”

  “I didn’t remember him having full lips like that. I don’t know if his lips now are the way they would have been then, or if they swell up more after death or something. Is that a normal characteristic? Now the face—the size of the fellow—it doesn’t—I don’t know, maybe he’s the same size, but it just doesn’t look like the same fellow at all to me.”

  “I think this will be enough for now,” Flores said. Then he paused again. “Will you take another good look at him, though, please?”

  Gerald took another good look.

  “No, it doesn’t look like the same individual at all.”

  “Okay,” Detective Flores said. “Thanks a lot.”

  Gene Tinch was a private eye in the best fictional tradition. Besides the diamond rings and the gold-and-diamond bracelet, he carried his cash in a gold clip and a gun in his car at all times. He called a woman’s legs “gams.” He was big and handsome, funny and sociable and tough. He had been a cop, Los Angeles Police Department, for nearly twenty years, during which time he’d been shot at thirteen times and he had shot and killed two people. Now, after early retirement, he’d set up a private detective agency with a partner. The name of the agency was The Tin Goose.

  As soon as Ned Nelsen took Hope’s case, he suggested to Honey and Van that a private detective—specifically, Gene Tinch, whom Ned had worked with before—could help a lot. “If the client has the funds, I always hire a private investigator,” Ned explained. “For two reasons. One, a private investigator can get a lot of legwork done that would be time-consuming for a lawyer, and two, most good private investigators have access to police information that a lawyer doesn’t have.” Although Ned’s client did not exactly have the funds, Honey and Van agreed to hire Gene at a rate of one hundred fifty dollars for an eight-hour day, to a maximum of five thousand dollars, with twenty-five hundred dollars to be paid right away and with all expenses—mileage, meals, motels—to be itemized, with receipts. Ned had called Gene at home and, first thing Wednesday morning, before he drove up to Tulare County with Tom Breslin, Gene paid three hundred to a pair of electronic technicians to go by Honey’s house, and Hope’s house on the Drive, to debug, if necessary.