A Death in California

by Barthel, Joan;

  “My daughter is not well,” Van said. “I don’t know what even a few days in jail would do to her. I fear for her.”

  Now the courtroom was dramatically stilled as Van told, briefly, the story Hope had told him of the weekend at the ranch and the man who had come to his home on Tuesday.

  “We are still trying to find out the identity of the man who came to the ranch, found the corpse, and discovered my daughter tied to a bed,” Van said. “This man brought my daughter back to Los Angeles, but he refuses to give his name—or his proper name—because he apparently is not a citizen. He claims to be a free-lance foreign correspondent and has told my wife by telephone he will send a deposition to the district attorney in Visalia.

  “He’s still in town. He’s still around. I’m hoping we can find him, but it’s hard to find a person like this. I need my daughter to straighten out these unknowns.” He gave the court his personal guarantee that Hope would return for the March 15 hearing, adding that she and her children were almost entirely supported by him and she had no money to flee.

  Judge Carter looked closely at Van, then at the girl. He did not feel sorry for her at all. The way he saw it, somebody was lying dead, and this girl had been involved in some way, and maybe without all the drugs and things up at that ranch, maybe somebody wouldn’t be dead. But he was very impressed with Van, with what Van had said and the way he’d said it, so Judge Carter called a recess to consider whether Hope Masters would be released on bail.

  “This is Taylor again,” the caller said. “Were you able to reach Van?”

  “No,” Mary Bowyer said. “Were you?”

  It was 3:35 P.M.

  “I called,” Taylor said, “I got a court clerk or someone, but they would not bring anyone to the phone, court proceedings going on. Could not leave a message because I did not have a number to call back. You haven’t heard anything from Van?”

  “No,” Mary said sharply. “I told you I had not heard from him.”

  “Put in another call and try to reach Van,” Taylor ordered. “I will call you back later. How is Hope?”

  “Hopie is ill, and being in jail has not helped,” Mary retorted. “Mr.—what did you say your name was?”

  The man laughed. “Just call me Taylor, honey. No one knows my name and I want to keep it that way.”

  Mary Bowyer tried pleading. “How can you do this to Hopie? She is so ill, so tiny—”

  “Jail is not the most pleasant place to be,” Taylor agreed. “But don’t worry. She will be out today, and Van and Honey will see she gets the care she needs. How are the children? Are they with Honey and Van?”

  “I am sure the children are being cared for,” Mary said, “but they need their mother. Why don’t you come forward and help Hopie?”

  “She will get my help, but I have to do it my way,” Taylor said firmly. “I am not an American national and I am involved in an internal triangle. I cannot make an appearance and chance being picked up. Hope is fragile, but things will work out for her.

  “I do want to help, and I have made an affidavit that will throw much light on the matter. Too bad I could not get through to Nelsen or Van. You try again to reach Van. I will call later.”

  Van’s secretary called Ned’s secretary again, and again they decided there was no point in calling Porterville, with nothing to report. Each woman had checked on how to trace a call, each told the other, and each had been told it could not be done.

  Virginia Anderson, the court clerk, was not a clock-watcher, so she was never certain of the precise time she’d noticed the well-dressed man in the last row of the courtroom, on the bench nearest the door. She saw him there just before Hope Masters’s arraignment began, and during the first part of the proceeding, before the recess. She was struck by how well-dressed he was, in a white or ivory-colored turtleneck and a camel-colored jacket. He had dark brown hair. Although she only observed him seated, she took him to be tall, about six feet, 175 to 185 pounds. She thought he might be an attorney; she didn’t see Hope Masters speak to him, or make any gesture, but she did see Mrs. Masters turn.

  During the recess, which Mrs. Anderson thought was between 3:30 and 4:00, approximately, a court employee handed her a note for Mr. Nelsen, telling him that a Mr. Taylor was calling. Virginia Anderson didn’t recall seeing the well-dressed stranger after the recess, though she never saw him leave, either. Neither did William Thompson, the bailiff, though he too had taken note of the immaculately dressed man on the bench nearest the door. Bailiff Thompson had worked in this courtroom for twelve years and knew most everybody who came in, but he didn’t know this man. The bailiff was certain of the seat the man had taken, because it had always seemed a favorite seat and he’d seen many people try to take it, over the years, maybe because it was right at the door and a person could get out quickly.

  Judge Carter had told the truth when he said he was tired. He had just driven back from San Francisco after a three-day bar exam that he had found a grueling, even a humiliating experience. Although as a justice of the peace, he was called judge, he was not an attorney, and he had heard that the system was due to change; with the district growing, the justice court would become a municipal court and the judicial requirements would be stiffened. George Carter felt comfortable in court, after fifteen years as a probation officer, so, in order to stay on the bench, he had been going to law school at night. This meant driving over to Fresno and back after a full day’s work, tired before he even started out, sometimes fighting ground fogs so thick the roads were technically closed, one hundred and fifty miles roundtrip, three nights a week. He had talked Jim Heusdens into going to law school with him, and Jim had passed the bar—he was now a deputy D.A.—but George had taken it once, failed, and now had tried again. He was beginning to think it wasn’t worth the trouble and, at age fifty-three, he thought maybe he ought to forget about the law, say “the heck with it,” and concentrate on his family, his cattle, and his grove of tangerines.

  Meantime, however, he had to decide on bail for the accused. If he hadn’t been so tired, if he’d had a good night’s sleep, he reflected later, he probably wouldn’t have done it. But being so tired and worn down, he kind of gave in, and announced that upon consideration, he had decided to set bail for Hope Masters at fifty thousand dollars.

  Hope slumped in relief. Tom Breslin smiled broadly. Hope had been horrified when Judge Carter announced he had just taken the bar, and she had complained to Tom about it during the recess. “I thought judges had to have some legal experience,” she said in annoyance. “I didn’t think they could be appointed right off the farm.”

  But Tom liked Carter; he had a kind of slow, steady air about him, a placid, creased face that seemed kindly. “He’s a nice fellow,” Tom told Hope. “And I don’t mind anybody not passing the bar. There’s some real good people don’t pass it.”

  The district attorney’s argument for no bail had come as an unpleasant surprise to Tom Breslin. He had expected a fifty thousand dollar bond to be asked. Van had already arranged for that amount, through his Los Angeles bank to a local bank, so he was able to present a certified check within minutes. Then Ned Nelsen was steering Hope out the door, through a clamor of reporters and photographers, some of them local, but others from San Francisco and L.A. and the wire services. Hope covered her head with the black sweater, but the cameras didn’t stop clicking, and the UPI photograph that went out showed a skinny, headless person with the caption: “Camera Shy.”

  Hope’s stepbrother Michael pulled a black Cadillac up in front of the courthouse. Ned opened the door quickly and almost pushed Hope into the back seat. Ned shook Van’s hand, and Tom shook hands with Van with special warmth. Tom had met Van for the first time today, and he was impressed. “He didn’t up-play his status, but you knew he had the status,” Tom explained. “He was the one who swung it with Judge Carter.” Ned told Van he’d call him in the morning; then Van got into the front seat with Michael, and Honey sat in back, next to Hope. Honey was smil
ing now, chic and beautiful in her mink coat.

  Cameras kept clicking as the Cadillac moved down Morton Street to Main, and out Main to the highway. Within minutes the car was out of town, passing groves of olive trees with their silvery-green leaves, bushy and sturdy, among the oldest kinds of trees on earth. The Cadillac turned onto the highway, heading south.

  It was just one week since Hope had traveled this highway in the opposite direction, driving up to the ranch with Bill. One week. Friday to Friday; dream to elaborate nightmare; a week of blood and terror and heartbreak concluding in fine dramatic fashion when the stepfather she’d never gotten on with strode forward and clasped his arm around her trembling shoulders. “My daughter is not well. I fear for her.” Now Hope was safely nestled in the deep softness of her stepfather’s car, sleeping peacefully on her mother’s shoulder, going home.

  When they arrived, they began to argue immediately.

  Gene Parker and Jim Brown had slept fine on their waterbeds and had had a busy day, starting at breakfast with the other Tulare team, Babcock and Tucker, who had been up late interviewing Tom Masters.

  Parker and Brown got along well with Ralph Tucker, less well with Henry Babcock. As a sergeant, Babcock outranked them—the steps on the scale were deputy, detective, sergeant, and lieutenant—and he never seemed to let them forget it. In police language, Babcock was badge-heavy. Jim Brown had once heard Babcock refer to himself as the only educated person on the Tulare County Sheriff’s staff. “I’ve always thought there was a big gap between education and intelligence,” Jim Brown said dryly.

  Jim wasn’t a college degree person, either. He’d grown up on a farm in Ardmore, Oklahoma, until his family fled the Dust Bowl, when Jim was a little boy. They’d bought a farm in northern California, but Jim never cared much for farming, and when he finished high school in Tulare he’d worked as a salesman—used cars, potato chips—before he decided to try police work. When he joined the force in the spring of 1967, Jim said, he was “greener than a gourd,” but the man he was assigned to work with, Gene Parker, broke him in quickly. They made a good team. Parker talked a lot, very fast, in a deep voice; Brown talked slowly, almost in a drawl, and said less, and they got along famously. They both had a quick, dry humor and would have tried to make a joke out of it if people told them they were good cops, which is what people said. Together they had the highest crime clearance rate of any detective team in the Tulare office; for all the fun they poked at themselves, they ranked high every month at the practice range—day shooting, night shooting, left-handed, right-handed. What they lacked in college credits they made up for in not-so-common sense. When a puzzling double homicide occurred in Exeter—a man shot five times, a woman shot twice, both bodies lying in the front yard, near a car, both weapons nearby—Brown and Parker figured out how the thing had happened and, though nobody at the barracks believed them at the time, it turned out later, from the dead woman’s son’s eyewitness account, that Brown and Parker were absolutely right.

  In Los Angeles, however, they had to work with Babcock. “You stay outside,” Babcock told them, when they all got over to the L.A. Sheriff’s Office on Friday. “I’m going in to get the lay of the land.” But Parker and Brown and Tucker had only been waiting in the hall a minute when the door opened and they were asked to come in.

  “I’m Arthur Stoyanoff,” said a tall, dapper man behind the desk, reaching out his hand. “I want everybody who’s involved in this damned thing to be in here, so everybody can hear the same thing.” Parker and Brown were delighted, and a little awed at the size of the place. “I counted fifty-four homicide investigators just sitting around there in the L.A. Sheriff’s Office,” Parker said, marveling.

  They talked. Captain Stoyanoff assigned two of his men to help the Tulare men with anything they needed, so Parker and Brown talked more. Babcock and Tucker were working the Hope Masters angle; Parker and Brown were to check out the victim. They planned to start where Swalwell had started, with the pieces. “First we had to work up a background on Ashlock,” Parker explained. “What does he do? Who does he associate with? Has he had family problems? We didn’t know, one way or the other, about a third person at the ranch. We just went in with the idea of finding out what we could find out and put it all together and then try to determine what we’ve got here.”

  At Bill’s apartment, the building manager, Mrs. Oezkan, was very friendly. She telephoned Ashkenazy Property for permission to enter, then she let the policemen into Apartment 104 and followed them inside.

  The apartment was small, one room, with a piano and a sofa and a tiny kitchenette behind a bar. Mrs. Oezkan said that Mr. Ashlock had moved in on November 14, 1971, and had always seemed pleasant, a quiet person who kept pretty much to himself. She said he had a tall blond girlfriend and, just recently, she said, she had seen him with a short, dark-haired ladyfriend, about the same height as Bill.

  Although Mrs. Oezkan said Mr. Ashlock was a nice dresser, with a good variety of suits and sport coats, the detectives found only a couple pairs of pants and one or two shirts. They also found a few scraps of paper with names and addresses on them, and photographs of two women. They gave Mrs. Oezkan a property receipt for the pictures, which turned out to be photos of Hope and Sandi. As they left the apartment, the detectives noted that the peephole in the door had been covered.

  The detectives then went to Bill’s office and talked with Helen Linley. She told them that Bill had left the office on Friday afternoon, early, and hadn’t come in on Monday. When he still hadn’t come in on Tuesday, she called Hope Masters’s house; the maid told her Mrs. Masters was in bed and could not come to the phone. Later that day, Barry Carter, an artist with Dailey & Associates, had called, and the maid told Barry that Mrs. Masters had said Mr. Ashlock was still at the ranch.

  Mrs. Linley said that a woman Mr. Ashlock knew, named Sandi, telephoned the office. She had said she wanted to change a dinner date she had with Mr. Ashlock from Tuesday to Wednesday. Then Mrs. Linley talked about Van’s call, telling of the murder, and she told Parker and Brown what a nice man Bill Ashlock was, a gentle man, easy to get along with, possessing a quiet but keen sense of humor. Later, they heard the same kind of thing from Barry Carter, from Cliff Einstein, from Fran Ashlock, from Bill’s brother Bob, and from Sandi. “Everyone liked him,” Jim Brown wrote in his report.

  “I liked Bill,” Martha Padilla was saying, a little wistfully. “He was nice to me.”

  Martha and her twin sister Mary were at the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office, talking to Sergeant Babcock and Detective Tucker. Martha spoke in Spanish, through a translator, Dora Britton.

  Martha told the detectives how Mr. Ashlock and Mrs. Masters had left for the ranch the Friday before, in Hope’s station wagon, leaving Bill’s little green car in the driveway. But when Martha returned Monday night around 11:00, neither of those cars was there, she said. “Two new cars were there, one white, one yellow.” She had never seen either car before.

  Inside, she said she met a man whom Mrs. Masters told her was Bill’s friend. “He had long hair, and he wasn’t bad looking,” Martha recalled. Not fat, not skinny; “medium.” She remembered he’d told her not to eat too much or she would get fat. Martha noticed his pipe because it was so large, so strange; it seemed to have been cut from the bark of a tree. He told Martha he was from London.

  That was on Tuesday morning, Martha said. She didn’t speak to him Monday night, because he and Mrs. Masters were in the living room, with the door from the kitchen closed; Martha had opened it, seen them, and closed the door again. “I saw them lying down there,” she said. “She was rubbing his back, giving him a massage.”

  “Did you see them together in the bedroom?” Babcock asked.

  “I saw them lying down on the living room floor,” Martha repeated. “They had blankets, and there were a lot of suitcases. The children were in the bedroom. It is my thought that they were not in the bedroom because the children were occupying the bedroom.”


  “Did they sleep together that night?”

  “They closed the door to the kitchen,” Martha said. “They were lying down on the floor of the living room when I saw them—on the carpet, and I didn’t see them again that night.”

  “Did you see them kiss each other, or hug each other?”

  “No. What I did see was that they were both lying down and she was rubbing his back.”

  “Did they drink? Were they drinking?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did Bill’s friend have his shirt off?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did Bill’s friend stay all night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know where Bill’s friend slept?”

  “I believe they both slept on the carpet. On the floor.”

  “Did you see that they were lying down together when you came home?”

  “Yes.”

  Martha said when she got up Tuesday morning, the man was in the kitchen, cooking breakfast, and that was when she chatted with him.

  “Did Mrs. Masters receive any phone calls at the house while you were there?”

  “Yes,” Martha said. “One who called was Bill’s boss. Mrs. Masters told me it was Bill’s boss and to tell him that she was very ill and that Bill was at the ranch.”

  “Did Mrs. Masters give you any instructions about the telephone calls?”

  “Yes, she told me that if anybody called, to write it down and not to tell anyone that she was there. That I was to say that I didn’t know where she was and that I did not know where Bill was. And she told me she was going to the hospital because she was very, very, ill.”

  “Did you see Mrs. Masters cry or act upset?”

  “I saw her upset, and she was sad and very weak and with her eyes very sad, and she was very downhearted.”

  “Why was she like this?” Babcock asked.

  “I don’t know.”