by James Philip
“What have you done?” She asked, splashing neat gin into crystal tumbler.
Her husband grabbed a half-empty bottle of Kentucky bourbon and snatched the nearest glass from the mini-bar that curved around the pool end of the room. He threw an impatient, sneering look at his wife.
“Why the fuck are you all dressed up?”
“I’m meeting some girls for lunch on Santa Monica Boulevard,” Loretta snapped waspishly.
Reggie O’Connell knew better than that. His wife had struggled into a too tight top which emphasised her ample cleavage, pinched her waist and flattered her spreading curves. She rustled as she moved, her silk stockings shone almost electrically and she had obviously spent a lot of time ‘making up’ to look nearer thirty than forty. Loretta had been a bit part player in B movies a decade ago; she was the shapely blond who always got to walk on by at the scene of a crime, the plucky almost heroine that the director never trusted with more than two or three lines, or the sensuous sacrificial offering to a marauding alien monster on a set that honest to god actually looked like cardboard and papier-mâché, a Marilyn Monroe lookalike without the screen presence, sexual magnetism or the ability to huskily evoke fascination...
Reggie O’Connell had actually met Marilyn Monroe a couple of times; once before she was famous but she had been unforgettable even then. He had met a lot of movie people and done some of them favours, just not as many favours as many of Hollywood’s finest imagined. He tended to operated down among the also rans, sorting out the little problems of small time city club owners, politicians and the sort of honest citizens who did not like to wait for smart lawyers to make their local difficulties go away.
“You aren’t listening to a fucking word I’m saying!” His wife raged, dunking her tumbler so hard on the bar the man was surprised it did not instantly shatter into a thousand splinters.
“Sorry. Didn’t think you had anything to say to me?”
“I asked you what you’d done?” Loretta repeated doggedly. “Ever since that night you’ve been running away from something?”
Reggie O’Connell had known there was more to Loretta than the big hair and big tits; he ought to have married a plain girl who had never lived in his world. Mrs Reggie O’Connell ought by rights to be a woman who could present a respectable front, who would never think to ask any of the obvious questions; but marrying his mother had never really appealed to him.
He refreshed his grip on the neck of the bottle of Kentucky bourbon, turned his back on his wife and walked out onto the patio. He did not look back as Loretta vented a string of expletives before stamping out of the house.
The tyres of her convertible squealed loudly on the driveway.
And then Captain Reggie O’Connell of the Los Angeles Police Department was alone in the quite of the Hollywood Hills gulping bourbon like it was going out of fashion.
As he drank he contemplated the color of despair.
It was darkly amber; like the hue of the whisky in his glass.
As he drank, the darkly amber vortex of his premonitions reached out for him and dragged him down, down, into its drowning depths.
Chapter 44
Saturday 19th January 1964
National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda, Maryland
In the last fortnight most of the patients who could safely be moved to hospitals and rehabilitation centers in Maryland, Virginia and farther afield had departed the NNMC. The hospital had returned to its pre-Battle of Washington status; the corridors were unblocked, the building was undergoing a systematic deep cleansing exercise and the relatively superficial external damage caused by nearby fighting was being made good. In many wards there were empty cots and the medical staff had stopped working seven day fourteen hour long shifts over a week ago.
Depressingly, despite the normalization of hospital life every time Dan Brenckmann looked out of the window from Gretchen Betancourt’s fourth floor room the devastation of the great city was undiminished. In fact, as the clearance work progressed the true scale of the monumental reconstruction task ahead became more graphically evident.
Gretchen had reached that stage of her recovery which experienced clinicians often call the ‘tetchy phase’. She was well enough to have a small reserve of energy with which to rail against the iniquity of fate; and it was not in her nature to hold back when she was upset about something.
The fact that in the last few days a little normal color had come back into Gretchen’s cheeks had done a great deal more to raise Dan’s personal morale than the sudden, rather unexpected rush of job offers he had received. Notwithstanding that he guessed Gretchen’s father had to be behind these offers, he was a little baffled. Not least because he had no idea what the majority of them entailed and there was hardly anybody left in DC he could ask.
Gretchen was propped up, half-sitting in the big bed under the windows when he walked in that evening. She had been ‘tubeless’ the last four days and Dan was pleased and mightily relieved to see that for the fourth day in a row nothing had gone sufficiently awry to necessitate any of the discarded tubes needing to be plugged back in. He had got used to thanking his lucky stars for every small mercy in the last month.
It was a measure of Gretchen’s gradual improvement that she was getting very bored. Today a paperback book lay opened on the covers of the cot; proof positive that at some stage earlier that day she had had the strength to open it and read it unaided. Dan instantly felt a pang of guilt; he ought to have come in earlier and either held the book open for her or read to her.
“Before you ask I’m fed up with being in here and pissed off that nobody will answer a straight question when I ask one!” Gretchen complained feebly, her voice a hoarse, reedy parody of its former customary stridency.
Gretchen’s previously sculpted dark brown hair had been shaved away soon after she was admitted to the NNMC – at the time surgeons were afraid she had bleeding on the brain and were ready to crack open her skull and operate at short notice – and it was growing back in a boyish fuzz. Every bandage, plaster and suture had been removed from her face and scalp, likewise the metal cage initially used to keep her head and neck immobilized. A lightweight gauze bandage still obscured her throat below her chin where Dan had been assured that the tracheotomy wound was healing ‘nicely’.
Dan greeted Gretchen’s complaint with an apologetic smile as he approached, then he leaned over her and planted a pecking kiss on her brow; as he had done every day he had visited her since he discovered her registered at the hospital as a Jane Doe on the fourth day after the outbreak of the Battle of Washington. He had been afraid she would not pull through that first day, later he was worried that she would be horribly crippled by her injuries. Each day the news had either been no worse, or perhaps, a fraction better and that kiss had become a superstition.
Gretchen was supposedly engaged to be married to one of her second or third cousins, a banker called Joseph van Stratten whose mother was related to Eleanor Roosevelt. According to Gretchen’s father the worried fiancé had made a duty call to him a couple of weeks ago to inquire about his ‘intended’s’ wellbeing but otherwise shown no great interest whatsoever in her situation. Since Dan thought Gretchen was the most marvellous woman in the world he found Joseph the Banker’s indifference odd and frankly, inexplicable.
Dan sat down beside the cot.
“Ask me a straight question and I’ll see if I can help, Miss Betancourt,” he invited amiably.
“My legs and toes are tingling a lot,” Gretchen frowned, “nobody will tell me if that’s a good thing!”
“It is a good thing,” he assured her blithely.
“Um. I suppose you are going to tell me I’ll be running around in no time?”
Dan shook his head.
“No. But that’s good news, too.”
“How so?” Gretchen murmured, knowing he was gently teasing her.
“You can’t run away so I get to have you all to myself a little longer.” He was not abo
ut to start lying to her about a thing like that!
Gretchen wearied very fast.
“You’re working for father...”
“I seem to be,” he admitted. “But I’ve had a lot of offers of work lately. A couple of them are real humdingers. Probably, also your father’s doing. The Judge Advocate’s Department is recruiting assistant defense counsels ahead of the first tranche of trials arising out of the rebellion. I think the Army is still calling it that, not a coup d’état. Personally, I think it was a coup d’état, but that’s by the way. I’m not sure I’m really very keen defending people who tried to blow up the Capitol and to overthrow the Government.”
The death toll for the Battle of Washington climbed daily. Not as fast as it had climbed in the week after the end of the main fighting but fast enough as more bodies were discovered and the lists of the missing were slowly whittled down to the dead, the injured and the displaced.
A fresh accounting was issued by the Office of the Military Government of the District of Columbia at noon every day, and the centralized name and casualty lists updated accordingly.
Dan had picked up a copy of the release at the Judge Advocate’s temporary office that morning after his preliminary interview for an assistant counsel position.
Known to have died as a direct result of the insurrection in the fighting, associated civil disorder and as a result of the breakdown of customary urban services between 08:12 hours 12/9/63 and 1/19/64: 8,688 persons.
The total for those listed as missing: 2,051 persons.
The total number of those listed as injured or wounded surviving as of this day: 27,005 persons.
Of the dead and missing: 1,117 were members of the United States Armed Forces (including National Guardsmen), 392 were members of the Washington DC Police Department, 363 were members of the Washington DC Fire Department and 407 persons were civilian members of working for or affiliated to these services. These figures include 288 civilians who are known to have died at the Pentagon. The overall figure for deaths includes 1,681 persons (of whom 34 are women) believed to have been materially involved in the insurrection.
Of those listed as missing approximately 25% are military personnel and 10% WDCPD and WDCFD.
Of the injured and wounded 3,274 remained hospitalized at this time; 85 of these persons are suspected of involvement in the insurrection and a further 171 injured persons suspected of involvement are currently held in secure military detention.
The total number of persons suspected to have been involved in the insurrection presently held in secure military detention is 839 men and 67 women.
Since the insurrection over 1,500 persons have been detained indefinitely in secure custody under suspicion of committing offences under the regulations governing the conduct of the Military Governorship of the District of Columbia (for example, looting or acts of civil disorder such as rioting or obstructing the authorities).
Excluding those persons believed to have been directly involved in the insurgency the approximate overall ratio of casualties by occupation, gender and age is as follows:-
Total casualties 36,043; of whom 17% were in the military or related professions, or members of the WDCPD or WDCFD. Approximately 91% of these deaths were male, and 9% female. Another 13% of the casualties worked directly for the Federal Government. 1.5% worked on Capitol Hill or at the White House.
Overall, 36% of all casualties were adult males over the age of eighteen. 51% of all casualties were adult females over the age of eighteen. 13% of all casualties were aged below the age of eighteen (48% male and 52% female). 6% of all casualties were aged 10 years or younger. Within the casualties figures for adults 16% were persons over the age of sixty (39% male and 61% female).
Dan had no idea how anybody who was accused of being an ‘insurgent’ had a snow flake’s chance in Hell of getting a fair hearing this side of the global background radiation level returning to pre-October War levels!
None of which he was about to share with Gretchen.
“I’ve been offered a shot at an assistant counsel post on the Warren Commission,” he confessed. “Nothing about that is cut and dried though, I’ve got to meet Chief Justice Warren and he can consign me to the backwoods with a flick of his fingers.”
Gretchen hesitated, took several shallow breaths to collect her thoughts. She had started doing that again in the last few says – collect her thoughts, that was – before she offered an opinion.
“I think if I was you I’d go for the Judge Advocate’s offer.”
“Oh?”
Again there was a pause while Gretchen gathered herself to speak.
“You could make a name for yourself defending rebels,” she forced what might have been a fleeting wan smile. “Whereas everybody will be looking at Earl Warren and the senior members of the Administration on the commission into the war, but nobody’s going to remember the names of any of the assistant counsels...”
Dan grinned broadly.
“The Judge Advocate’s people say the first ‘rebellion’ trials won’t be until May or maybe June at the earliest,” he informed the woman he had adored from the moment over two years ago he had seen her across a garden in Quincy. Quincy no longer existed, neither did the garden of one of her Father’s senior partners at law; nevertheless, he had been in Gretchen’s thrall ever since. “We both know that there’s only one attorney in this room who is in a real hurry to ‘make their name’.”
He chuckled fondly, patted Gretchen’s hand.
“Do you think you can be out of here by then?”
Chapter 45
Saturday 19th January 1964
Nob Hill, San Francisco, California
Gregory Sullivan parked his decrepit old Dodge around the block from his Aunt and Uncle’s house. Darlene had fallen quiet since the morning and he knew why; things had moved so fast between them that they had lost control and by upbringing and disposition, he suspected that she was naturally more wisely cautious about things than he was ever going to be if they both lived to be a hundred-and-one. He felt a little guilty to have jumped so far ahead, to have started making assumptions and decisions that by rights ought to have been made at leisure, rather than at a mad sprint in the heat of the moment. And now he felt like a klutz because Darlene was fretting about upsetting him and it was all his fault!
He switched off the engine and they sat in the silence as dusk fell. These days the street lights never came on until a couple of hours after sunset, and then only on the main streets. It was one of many little post-war ‘adjustments’ which nobody had ever had the chance to vote for.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly.
“For what, sweetheart?” Darlene returned, timidly languid in the gloom.
“For being so pushy about things.”
“Oh, that,” she whispered as if that was not any kind of problem. “That’s not it,” she added, uncertainly plaintive. “The thing is you hardly know me.” She liked the sound and feel of sweetheart as it rolled off her tongue; as yet she lacked the confidence to use the endearment routinely. Darling would never do, it sounded too much like her own name and her accent transformed darling into darlin’. Aunt Molly and Uncle Harvey called Gregory Greg, she preferred Gregory even thought that was what Miranda always called him. “The thing is I ain’t no genteel little southern belle, sweetheart.”
The man opened his mouth to argue but Darlene reached across and took his right hand, guiding it back to rest on her thigh, and held tight between both her trembling hands.
“I want things to be straight between us,” she went on, her tone becoming dogged, dripping with stubbornness. “I was damaged goods a long time before I ran off with Dwayne. You should know Dwayne never laid a finger on me until we’d been in California six months. That’s just for the record. But I wasn’t no virgin when I first went with Dwayne, my Ma’s second husband made sure of that when I was fifteen...”
“Shit!” Gregory Sullivan uttered in horror. “You were raped when you
were just a girl?”
“Rape?” Darlene smiled unhappily. “No, it wasn’t rape, sweetheart. It was more that if I didn’t let him do what he wanted me to do he’d beat up on my Ma and my kid brothers,” Darlene retorted resignedly. “Anyways, after a while it turned out he was shooting blanks, either that or there’s something wrong with me because I didn’t get into trouble. Maybe it was my Ma’s advice, she kept the bastard away from me when she thought I was likely to get pregnant. I don’t know, maybe I was just lucky...”
“Lucky?”
Darlene brushed past this.
“Dwayne’s people ran an auto workshop. Him and his Pa was the only niggers allowed to drive up the white folks’ end of town.” Darlene stopped, aware instantly that she had already been away from the place she had called ‘home’ so long that her whole world sense had shifted. Here she was talking like she was still in Alabama. There were Blacks and Hispanics, Latinos and Chinamen in California but there were no ‘niggers’, even the word ‘negro’ sounded and felt wrong, something alien and poisonous tipping off her remembered southern tongue. “Dwayne’s a year or two older than me. I knew him from when I was nine years old. He was always a nice guy, he always had smile on his face. I didn’t know then that his Pa was a drinker and a philanderer, the worst kind, the godly kind that carries the ‘good book’ around with him like a broken bottle.”
The bitterness rose in her throat, choked her momentarily.
“Anyways, Dwayne and me found out we needed to be someplace else at about the same time. My Pa would have killed me if I’d stayed another day longer; Dwayne, he just wanted another life, I think. So we skedaddled, took a bus up to Birmingham and jumped on the first Greyhound out of town. We couldn’t travel together, not until we got out west, but Dwayne and me, we looked out for each other. At the time we didn’t care if we got on a Greyhound going east or west or north, just so long as it wasn’t going any further south. When we got out west to California I earned money cleaning and waitressing, Dwayne tried to get work in auto shops. We scraped along. We were doing okay, I suppose, then this guy called Johnny Seiffert turned Dwayne’s head. He got him a couple of backing sessions at his studio. The pills were free when you were one of Johnny’s boys. Uppers, downers, and the ones that make you see and do things you don’t ever want your Mamma to know about. Thinking about it, Dwayne and me were finished that day him and Miranda got it together the night of the war at Johnny’s place on Haight Street.”
