Pennies on a Dead Woman's Eyes

by Marcia Muller

  She read the information form the pad. Melissa’s mother had described her occupation as housewife, her father as a plumber; over a seven-year period between Melissa’s birth and the father’s death, they had lived at three different addresses in the Mission district. Melissa’s stepfather had called himself a laborer; the Woodses had resided on Shotwell Street, not far away from Bernal Heights.

  When Rae finished, I asked, “Anything else?”

  “Just their party affiliations. The Cardinals registered Democratic. So did Lawrence Woods. Then in forty-eight both he and Melissa’s mother switched to the Progressive party, and that’s how Melissa registered too. After forty-eight, there’s no registration for either the stepfather or Melissa.”

  “Progressive party.” I glanced at Jack. “Wasn’t that the one that ran Henry Wallace for President.”

  He nodded. “Looks as if the Woodses were lefties.”

  “And they lived here in Bernal Heights.” Given what Adah Joslyn had told me about her left-leaning parents, the Woodses would have fit right in—maybe even been a shade conservative.”

  Rae asked, “Who’s Henry Wallace?”

  Jack stared at her in astonishment and dismay. “And you call yourself a liberal?”

  “Well, how am I supposed to know?” She said defensively. “I wasn’t even born until the mid-sixies.”

  “But you ought to have some sense of history. I presume you’ve heard of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal? Wallace was vice president under him, was dumped in favor of Harry Truman on the forty-four Demo ticket. Wallace went on to oppose what he called Truman’s reactionary politics, got branded as a Communist sympathizer, and was roundly defeated as the Progressive candidate in ‘forty-eight.”

  “So the Progressives were actually Communists?”

  “No, they were not. The Progressives were victims of a well-orchestrated campaign by the Democratic opposition to identify them as Communists in the public mind. You might say they were among the earliest casualties of the anti-Communist crusade.”

  “Huh.” Rae said. “That’s interesting, but what does it have to do with our case?”

  “Probably nothing, but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to give you a history lesson.” Jack winked at me, then frowned. “Why do you have that weird expression on your face?”

  “I do?” I said. “Yes, I guess I do. Something’s connecting here, in a vague way.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t pin it down yet. I need more information.” Quickly I looked around and spotted a long phone cord snaking across the floor, got up and followed it to where the instrument sat behind a stack of dirty dishes on the drainboard of the sink. The kitchen phone was the sole relic of the days when red phones with twenty-five foot cords had been an All Souls tradition. Eventually they’d been replaced by amore sophisticated system, and I for one didn’t miss having to track them down by sorting through a maze of often impossibly snarled cords.

  I called SFPD Homicide, but found Adah Joslyn was off duty; there was no answer at her home number. Next I unearthed a chopping block. A Rupert Joslyn was listed on Powhattan Avenue, only a few blocks away. Briefly I wondered if Adah would resent my contacting her parents without clearing it with her; then I shrugged and dialed.

  Mrs. Joslyn answered. She said she and her husband would be delighted to talk history with a friend of Adah’s and suggested I come by in half an hour. I agreed, and went to grab another slice of pizza before Rae and Jack finished it.

  The Joslyn home was a bungalow faced in the kind of fake sand-colored stone that is guaranteed to make anyone swear off the use of synthetic building materials. As I rang the doorbell, I mentally prepared for an encounter with the sort of people Adah had described as “interesting . . . particularly if you don’t have to live with them.”

  And was pleasantly surprised. Barbara Joslyn, an attractive woman in a boldly striped caftan, was warm and gracious, eager to put a visitor at ease. Her husband, Rupert, tall and muscular with only grizzled hair to betray his age, was quieter but affable.

  While his wife fetched coffee, he settled me in their plainly furnished parlor, opening windows and commenting on the unseasonable warm spell. When Mrs. Joslyn returned, I apologized for interrupting their evening and got right to my questions.

  “Jane and Larry Woods?” Rupert Joslyn said. “Of course I knew them. If you think Bernal Heights is a small community now, you should have seen it right after the war.”

  “I didn’t know them,” Barbara Joslyn added, “but I know what happened to all those people. Criminal, just criminal.”

  “What did happen?” I asked. “The only information I have is that Jane Woods died of pneumonia in December of nineteen forty-nine.”

  The couple exchanged glances. “Was pneumonia, all right,” Rupert said, “but compounded by the situation. Jane just plain gave up on life.”

  “Had it taken from her, no matter how indirectly,” Barbara said.

  “Now Barb, don’t start.”

  “Maybe the passage of forty-some years has blunted your anger. Not mine.”

  “You were only a college girl at that time.”

  “That doesn’t give me the right to be angry?”

  I was beginning to understand what Adah had meant when she’d said it was a wonder that her parents had survived, given their differences. I would have hated to get between them during a really heated ideological debate.

  A shade plaintively I asked, “What happened to the Woodses?”

  Rupert said, “Forgive us. Larry Woods and his wife were good friends of my first wife and me. I feel their story personally while Barb sees it as a metaphor.”

  “Metaphor, my ass!”

  “Watch your mouth, woman!

  “Then don’t go putting me down.”

  “The way it was, Sharon—”

  “When the anti-Communist backlash started—”

  “Larry wasn’t ever a Communist—”

  “Didn’t matter in those days. All those dangerous labels and catchphrases they had: fellow traveler, dupe, concealed member—”

  I held up my hand. “Wait! Please. You’ve completely lost me.”

  They both looked startled, as if they’d forgotten they had a listener. “Barb,” Rupert said, “one of us is going to have to be designated spokesperson.”

  “Well, you’re personally involved in the story, while I’m taking it to the objective level. Let’s ask Sharon which version she’d prefer.”

  Great, I thought, make me choose sides. “How about if I hear the personal view first, and then you”—I looked at Barbara—”can place it in context.”

  They both nodded, apparently satisfied. Rupert steepled his fingers and sank deeper in his chair—a storyteller’s pose. “My first wife and I came to San Francisco during the war. I worked at the shipyards. That’s where I met Larry Woods. He and his wife, Jane, had been married less than ten years—second time for both of them. His boy, Roger, was already grown and out of the house. Jane’s girl, Melissa, had finished high school and was working in a plant down in South City. Nice family.”

  “Rupe, get to the point!”

  He winked at me and made a show of ignoring her. “After V-J Day, Larry got on with San Francisco Stevedoring, a big contractor. He joined the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union. Larry came up fast in the union, got involved with the Progressive Citizens of America, the outfit that the Progressive party spun off of. I suppose he might even have gone to a few American Communist party meetings—more out of curiosity than anything else.”

  Rupert paused, sighing heavily. As he spoke, the last vestiges of daylight had faded; across the room, Barbara sat in shadow, arms folded across her breasts.

  After a moment Rupert went on. “I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but Communist party members played a big role in organizing the CIO unions—and the ILWU was one of them. A lot of Party members rose pretty high in the union hierarchy. But by forty-eight t
he tide of opinion had turned against them. CIO leadership condemned them—for the most part, unjustly—as agents of a foreign power. Pretty soon the union leaders got swept up in the hysteria of the times, and even members who had supported Wallace for president were being denounced. Larry Woods in particular was in trouble; he’d been too outspoken for his own good, made to many enemies. Three days before Christmas of that year, he was beaten and left for dead in a South of Market alley by a trio of fanatically anti-Communist ILWU members.

  “Of course the beating only made him more vocal, and the harassment escalated. Larry, Jane and Melissa virtually lived in fear. By the middle of forty-nine, Larry was on a downhill slide; they tossed him out of the union, and he lost his job. Couldn’t get another; a blacklist existed in the trades long before it did in Hollywood. Jane had never been strong, and the strain of it took its toll. When she caught pneumonia, it carried her off. A few weeks after she died, Larry disappeared.”

  Rupert paused again, pressing his forehead against his steepled fingers. I could feel him fighting for control. “Larry’s son, Roger, searched for him for over three years. He finally found him, late in the summer of ‘fifty-three, in an L.A. charity ward—his liver and his mind shot. He died two days later.”

  Rupert’s voice had broken; he cleared his throat. Barbara made a little noise—of understanding as well as of sympathy. She said, “I’m sure you’ve read about what it was like during the cold war, Sharon. History has, fortunately, been revised so the truth can be told. But to know the horror of it all, you had to live through it. Rupert lived through it as a laborer, I as an intellectual, but believe me, no matter who you were, the horror was the same.”

  “Not all the anti-Communist union members were thugs like the three who beat up Larry,” Rupert added. “Most were like me, good union men who knew we had to get the hard-core Party members out in order for the labor movement to survive. Was just the climate of those times. That’s not what shames me.”

  His voice dropped, took on a husky timbre. “What does shame me is that I did nothing for Larry. I saw what would happen to my friend. I even warned him. But I never did risk my own hide to help him.”

  “That was the tactic the government crusaders used on us,” his wife said. “They made us afraid of them, and what’s worse, they made us afraid of one another. A person who is afraid of his or her fellows is alone, and a lone person is easily controlled.”

  “Was no excuse for me doing nothing, though.”

  “Not an excuse—a reason.”

  For a moment I remained silent, thinking of that dangerous aloneness. Then I asked, “What happened to Roger Woods?”

  Rupert raised his head and glanced at Barbara. “No one really knows,” he replied. “From what his father told me, I assumed that Roger was very far to the left. After the conspiracy trials in ‘forty-nine, a lot of Party members took their activities underground.”

  “Are you saying Roger was a Communist?”

  “Again, I don’t know. I never actually met him. He called me late in ‘fifty-three to tell me his father was dead, and after that I never heard another word.”

  “That must have been about the time he and Melissa were living together in North Beach. He wasn’t there long. Their landlord described him as angry, unpleasant.”

  “Understandable, given what was done to his father.”

  Barbara said, “What was done to everyone. Ironic—’the Red Menace,’ Russian communism, is dead today. But because of our government’s unreasoning fear of it, so many of our people were destroyed.” She went on to talk some more of the cold war and the anti-Communist crusade, and though I had read a good deal about it, I now began to feel what she’d called the horror of those times.

  Barbara described a world where the ground beneath the feet of the average citizen was as unstable as quicksand. An atmosphere so oppressive that an individual could be deprived of his or her livelihood for the simple act of writing a check to a charitable organization rumored to have leftist leanings. A time when informing on one’s friends, neighbors, and relatives was seen as the only means of survival; when truth was made malleable in the hands of congressional inquisitors; when honest statements of fact were twisted and used as boomerangs against those who had made them. To live in those times, I thought, was not unlike living in a grim fun-house maze, where you would never know if you were making a false move until the chute opened under your feet and you found yourself plunging into oblivion.

  By the time I took my leave of the Joslyns, my own world seemed a very precarious place. As I walked to my car, I searched the surrounding darkness—and didn’t even mock myself for doing so.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  But what did any of the things I’d just learned have to do with McKittridge murder?

  I sat in my MG in front of the Joslyn house, pondering the question. Had Melissa, like her stepbrother Roger Woods, possessed Communist leanings? Perhaps even been a Party member? And so what if she had? Surely the leftist leanings of a roommate could have had little bearing on the vicious killing of a twenty-one-year-old woman who seemed more inclined toward cocktail parties than political parties.

  Or had Cordy been more politically involved than I suspected? I still hadn’t found out how she’d met Melissa. What if . . . ?

  The lights went off in Joslyn parlor. I started my car, checked my watch in the light of the dash. Nine-forty. Not too late to run by All Souls and talk the matter over with Jack.

  When I arrived, Rae, Ted, and Pam Ogata were gathered in front of the TV set in the living room, watching an old Edward G. Robison movie on one of the cable channels. I paused in the archway and asked if Jack was around.

  Rae said, “Try the Remedy. He went down there to meet Judy.” Then she glanced back at the screen, shook her head, and got up. “If you want, I’ll wander down there with you. This movie is depressing.”

  As we walked down the hill toward Mission Street, I told her about my visit to the Joslyns.

  “Weird coincidence,” she commented, “that Adah would tell you about her parents the day before you needed that kind of information.”

  “As I always tell you, She provides.” I pointed to the heavens.

  We turned onto Mission and maneuvered our way through the crowd to the Remedy Lounge, a short block away. The locals were out in force tonight: people congregated in doorways or by parked cars, drinking and talking; music, from heavy metal to salsa, drifted from the bars and clubs; drunks lurched along the sidewalk; junkies lurched in the shadows; old people surveyed passersby with fearful, darting glances; low-riders and patrol cars prowled. San Francisco nights are rarely warm, even when the daytime temperatures soar, and the people were taking advantage of the unexpected in their various ways.

  In contract, the Remedy was nearly deserted. Only four customers hunched over the elbow-worn bar. Owner, Brian O’Flanagan stood near the front, sipping coffee and staring through the streaky window. He saluted us, eyes lighting up when he saw Rae, his favorite customer.

  Jack sat alone in the rear booth, nursing a mug of beer; pleated and shredded cocktail napkins lay in a puddle of moisture. There was no sign of Judy. As we approached, he looked up hopefully; then his face fell into disappointed lines, which quickly degenerated to a scowl.

  “Some greeting,” Rae said, sliding into the booth next to him.

  Jack merely grunted.

  I sat down opposite. “Where’s Judy?”

  “Damned if I know.” His mouth twitched as he reached for his beer. “She said she’d meet me here at nine.”

  “Maybe something came up at the theater.”

  “I called; she’s not there.”

  Brian came over and set a glass of wine in front of me, a beer in front of Rae. So far as I know, she’s the only customer who has ever rated table service from Brian—unless you arrive with her, and then you rate it, too. After enviously observing this phenomenon for over a year, I finally asked him why she commanded preferential treatment.
Brian merely shrugged and said, “There’s a touch of the old country in her.” Since Rae is about as connected to her Irish heritage as I am to my one-eighth Shoshone ancestry, I didn’t see much basis to that claim. But I have to admit that it’s nice occasionally to be waited on at the Remedy.

  When Brian had gone back to the bar, I asked Jack, “Where do you suppose Judy is, then?”

  He hesitated a bit before he said, “I have no idea, and at the moment I don’t care. Judy’s making herself crazy over this mock trial. As soon as she found out her father had involved himself, she started calling me, badgering me to allow her to play herself in court. When I questioned the wisdom of that, she started . . . ‘interrogating’ is the only way I can put it. Interrogating me about every detail of my defense. Finally I told her we’d talk about it when you, Rae, she and I got together at dinnertime, and she blew up. That’s the reason she didn’t show earlier; I just said I hadn’t been able to reach her because I didn’t want to go into it at the time.”

  “But you’ve spoken with her since.”

  “Yes. She called around eight, sounding calmer. I suggested we meet here and talk. Then she didn’t show up for the second time.”

  “Why, do you suppose?”

  “I don’t know, but what I’m seeing is a pattern of periods of rationality followed by periods of irrationality, and I don’t like it one bit.”

  Rae asked, “Has this ever happened before?”

  “Well, Judy’s an actress and she tends to be melodramatic, but . . . She seemed fine when Lis first got out of prison and moved in with her. Then she started pressuring me about uncovering new evidence and going for a new trial. Lis was totally opposed, as well she should have been; the women didn’t want to spend what was left of her life in court. Judy gave it up for a while, but then she hit on the idea of a mock trial and actually talked with James Wald without warning me she was going to. The pressure started in again. Lis finally bowed to it. I got my back up, started dragging my feet. Finally I caved in.” He looked at me. “That’s when I sent you to talk with her.”