by James Philip
“I hear stuff. I never forget stuff,” the man shrugged. “The more you know the more interesting the world becomes. Well, that’s the way I look at it.”
Loretta knew Vincent Meredith was too good to be true.
Three weeks and three days ago she had come out of a bar on Santa Monica Boulevard where she had been drinking Mojitos with a girlfriend – they had both been bitching about their husbands – and discovered that the ignition of her convertible was dead. Vincent had happened by a couple of minutes later, offered to ‘look under the hood’, got oil and grease on his hands and persuaded the engine to fire up. They had got to talking while he ‘worked’. He was an attorney who got his kicks putting old cars and pickups back together and cruising, and he had spotted a genuine ‘damsel in distress’ a hundred yards away. She had introduced herself.
‘Call me,’ he had suggested, handing her his card.
A week later he had been getting down and dirty under her hood giving her the kind of service she had been aching for most of her life. Even the knowledge that Vincent had to have an angle – most likely an angle on Reggie – had given her only a fleeting pause for thought. She had been looking for a way out of her marriage practically from the start, preferably with alimony and her share of the house on Mulholland Drive; now she had found, or been found by, it did not really matter, an attorney who was giving her the sort of attention money simply could not buy. Everybody had their own angle, that was life and she was not about to hold that against Vincent unless or until he sold her out.
He was always going to sell her out, of course.
And sooner rather than later even though she suspected he was going to feel bad about it.
“I’m sorry,” Vincent said.
“Yeah, sure!” But Loretta was neither as angry nor as dismayed as she pretended.
“I lied,” the man admitted.
Loretta would have been disappointed if a good looking man like Vincent Meredith had not lied to get into her knickers.
“About what?”
“I wasn’t just passing by that day on Santa Monica Boulevard.”
“Yeah, well I figured that!”
“I think you did,” he agreed wanly.
“I still didn’t know what I was involved with then,” Vincent went on. “I still believed Reggie was just a dirty cop. Everybody knew that already, that was no big deal. I was just looking for an angle I could use to spring my client, Sam Brenckmann. The guy your husband put in the frame for accessory to murder one back in December. But then I started following the money trail. First it led back to San Francisco, and then back here to City Hall,” he shrugged apologetically, “and pretty well every place in the Valley.”
Loretta’s frown deepened as she crossed her arms across her ample breasts.
“You never asked me a single question about Reggie?”
“I didn’t have to. You told me about what a shit he was. Where he hangs out and when. The people I know filled in the gaps and got into his bank accounts.”
“I don’t understand,” she protested.
“The bastard will try to drag you into his shit,” Vincent stated with a bluntness that rocked Loretta back on her heels. Normally, at this stage of a sting he was fighting to keep the elation from blowing the top of his head off. Today he felt like a tool, the worst kind of shyster snake oil salesman. “You and anybody else he can bring down with him.”
Loretta swallowed hard, very dry-mouthed.
She was trapped; there was no way out.
“I always knew he was a dirty cop,” she hissed. “Of course I knew. All cops are dirty in the Valley, everybody knows that! I didn’t want to know any more. I never asked and he never said. The deal was his ‘friends’ didn’t come to the house and they didn’t bother me but he never kept that side of the deal. Even when I told him if he ever laid a finger on me again I’d cut his dick off!”
“Maybe we ought to sit down,” the man offered. “So that we can talk this thing through.”
“What’s to talk about?”
They had begun to circle each other beneath the looming crystal chandelier like cats afraid of each other’s claws. There were mirrors on two walls flanked by coat stands and small tables, one with a telephone on it, another with a tall ceramic vase that seemed odd without a spray of freshly cut flowers spilling from it. The man and the woman flicked glances at their doppelgangers reflected in the tall mirrors; both simultaneously struck by the strangeness of this scene.
“Reggie got reckless and made a bad mistake. He picked on somebody who has serious DC connections.”
“This Brenckmann guy?” Loretta queried. Nobody had cuffed her or read her rights, there were no cops or men in Homburgs and badly fitting 1950s suits in the room and now Vincent Meredith was dropping insider hints about the form of the runners and riders and giving her a glimpse of the lie of the land.
“His father is the new US Ambassador to the United Kingdom.”
Loretta blinked her confusion.
“The British Isles. The guy the President has picked to smooth over the waves with the British after we bombed them last month. The guy whose job it is to make sure we don’t get into another nuclear war any time soon.”
Loretta was not very strong on geography or politics of any description outside Los Angeles County; but she had extremely strong views about things like nuclear wars.
“Sam Brenckmann very nearly got beaten to death at San Bernardino two days ago. Almost certainly on the orders of your husband. He nearly didn’t make it.”
The woman visibly blanched at this.
“To cut to the chase,” Vincent said, hating himself, “I cut a deal with the guy in charge of the combined FBI and IRS investigation team assigned to Reggie’s case.”
“A deal?”
“Reggie is going to be facing an indictment for racketeering, perverting the course of justice, taking bribes on an industrial scale and frankly, God alone knows what other heinous shit the Feds and the IRS turn up in the next few months. The trouble is the way things look nobody is going to believe that you didn’t know exactly what was going on all the time. At best that makes you an accomplice before, during and after the fact and so far as prison time goes that’s ten to fifty in a Federal prison. If Reggie implicates you in a killing that becomes ninety-nine years.”
Loretta had gone as white as a sheet. Momentarily, she thought she was going to faint, and staggered.
Vincent caught her arm.
She steadied, raised her face and jutted her jaw at him as she threw off his support.
“What’s the deal?” She asked coldly.
“You turn state’s evidence in exchange for immunity from prosecution.”
“Just like that?”
“No,” Vincent Meredith confessed, somewhat more sanguinely than he felt. “No. Afterwards we both get to look over our shoulders the rest of our lives. Or disappear. Different names, different pasts, start over somewhere out of state, and make damn sure our faces never get to be plastered across a newspaper or on TV.”
Loretta’s thoughts were racing at impossible speeds and her head was a sudden cacophony of discordant white noise.
“We?” She demanded.
Vincent nodded.
“Once this thing breaks I’m going to be kind of a marked man around here,” his smile was rueful. “Reggie isn’t the LA PD’s only bad egg. Just the biggest and loudest. The Governor, the Mayor, the Chief of Police all need to be seen to be getting a grip. Things have drifted since the October War, people are starting to ask if California’s got its own Bellinghams up in the hills. The rebellion, or whatever it was, in DC has spooked everybody. Big business, the unions, the military, the FBI, and City Hall and the Governor’s Office are playing catch up. The state of emergency might have been lifted a couple of days back but a lot of people think they saw the shape of things to come; blanket bans on trade union activity, National Guardsmen outside every court room, the virtual suspension of states’ rights,
and the jails overflowing with people who looked the wrong way at a cop or a GI. This thing with the Ambassador’s son is perfect for all those guys. They can make a splash, be seen to be cracking down hard. The only trouble is that little people like you and me tend to get caught in the crossfire.”
Loretta O’Connell had stopped circling.
“The war never got this far south,” she reminded the man.
“Didn’t it. We all breathe the same air.”
“That’s not what I mean,” she snapped irritably. “Things went on as normal down here after the panic was over.”
“How weird was that?” Vincent sighed. “Half of Washington State is a war zone, Chicago too, Boston and Houston got chunks taken out of them, Buffalo doesn’t exist anymore so nobody’s going to go to Niagara for a romantic weekend any time soon. The country was in trouble before the war, we just didn’t know how much trouble. There were riots in every big city in the South last summer, there probably will be again this spring. Riots and maybe worse, a lot worse. Even out here several of the passes through the Sierra Madre and the Rockies are blockaded by crazies, survivalists, gangsters and religious nuts of twenty different flavours. And what did our precious government do about all this? Diddly squat! That’s what JF fucking K did about it!”
Loretta had got over her shock at finding herself between a hard place and a rock. She had only married Reggie because she needed protection from the ‘agents’ and ‘managers’ who had saddled her with the sort of debts no honest working girl was ever going to pay off if she lived – and carried on ‘working’ – until she was collecting her pension. Life was not a very complicated thing when you really got down to what mattered; when a girl was in a tight spot she did what she had to do. If selling out Reggie was her ticket out of this tight spot she was not about to start shedding crocodile tears.
“If you feel so strongly about it maybe you ought to go into politics?” She declared acidly.
They both heard the cars drawing up in front of the house.
Brakes squealed, doors slammed shut.
“The guy I cut the deal with was J. Edgar Hoover,” the man said in an outrageously matter-of-fact way. “He almost took the fall for what happened in Washington last month. Right now he’s so eager to get back in favour with the Administration he’d probably cut his right arm off if JFK asked him.”
The bells was ringing at the front door.
Vincent Meredith quirked a smile at Loretta O’Connell.
“That will be the old faggot arriving now.”
Chapter 48
Monday 21st January 1964
St Bernardine Hospital, San Bernardino California
Sam Brenckmann opened his eyes very slowly and with extreme caution because his skull felt as if there was somebody inside it swinging a hammer against his temples. He squinted, waiting patiently for the world to come into sharper focus. Very, very slowly, he began to make sense of his surroundings. He was in a white-washed room and the stench of disinfectant was pervasive, over-powering.
“Ah, not dead after all, then,” a husky but comfortingly familiar voice observed with a mixture of relief and maternal irritation. “That fucking idiot Vincent didn’t tell me that if you had an allergic reaction that fucking Mickey Finn could kill you!”
Sam blinked myopically at Sabrina Henschal. Momentarily he was hopelessly disorientated. He had had an affair with Sabrina – who was easily old enough to be his mother – and it had been the most fun he had had in his whole life until he realized it was not forever. But that had been a while back and since then...
Everything flooded back in an instant. He might have fainted briefly; the world went black and silent for several seconds.
“Judy?” He croaked, aware that his throat was on fire.
“Judy’s fine. She’s back in the Canyon with Tabatha.” Sabrina was smiling, her eyes oddly misty and wet, opaque. A tear fell on Sam’s cheek as she leaned across him to nuzzle his brow. “Vincent slipped you a Mickey Finn to make it look like you were having some kind of a fit. Remember? He made a big scene when the guards came running in; shouting about brutality and all that crap and making crazy allegations. It didn’t work out so well but the bastards would never have let you out unless they’d thought you were going to die.”
Sam felt as if his whole body had been hollowed out, lifeless and weak like a baby. He hardly dared try to lift a finger; not knowing if his body would actually co-operate.
“I feel,” he retorted, “like shit...”
“That figures,” the woman said, scowling. “You look worse, babe.”
“Anybody ever told you your bedside manner sucks, Sabrina...”
“That’s what they said at nurse school,” she grinned, tenderly stroking his face with her right hand.
Sam noticed the line going into the back of his left hand, looked up at the drip bags hung on an aluminium frame.
“Just saline, mostly,” Sabrina assured him casually. “They pump you full of Penicillin every few hours. They think you had some kind of bad reaction to than shit Vincent gave you. Miranda was completely freaked out!”
Miranda!
“Miranda’s hair looks good the way it is now,” Sam muttered, exhausted.
Sabrina scowled before she could stop it.
Sam was still delirious, obviously!
“Vincent would never have got in to see you and you’d probably be dead now if she hadn’t pulled strings,” Sabrina declared, reluctant to give the younger woman any credit. “Vincent reckons that bastard Reggie O’Connell must have put the word out to shut you and Doug Weston up for good! I didn’t believe it but when he said how beat up you were,” she shrugged and for a split second her defenses came crashing down, she looked sixty not pushing fifty and worn out, despairing. She recovered fast. “Anyway, Miranda came through for us.”
Sam heard clunking somewhere near his right hand.
“The bastards chained you to the cot,” Sabrina declaimed loudly and contemptuously as if she was talking to somebody in another room. “There’s a fucking cop outside the door!” She added, even louder. In a near whisper she went on: “And there’s a guy from the DA’s officer who wants to talk to you but Vincent says not to talk to him under any circumstances whatever he says to you or threatens you with, unless he’s in the room.”
The man wondered where Vincent Meredith was.
Reading his mind Sabrina answered his unspoken question.
“Vincent’s got business in the Hollywood Hills,” she explained, minx-like. She sighed. “How come you never said your folks had friends in the White House?”
Now Sam was bewildered beyond measure.
Sabrina moved so as to be able to support his head as she held a plastic beaker to his lips.
The cool water tasted like nectar as it dribbled down his chin and seeped into his throat.
“My folks,” he forced out after words had failed to form on his dry lips, “don’t have any friends in DC...”
Sabrina went on trying to get him to drink.
“Sam, baby,” she murmured several minutes later as she resumed her watching brief; somebody would be with Sam all the time while he was in the hospital they had decided. “Sam, baby, you have no idea!”
Chapter 49
Wednesday 22nd January 1964
Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia
Bobby Kennedy was under no illusion that the thousands of people filing down towards Auburn Avenue had come to see him; but as his heavily guarded cavalcade of bullet proof limousines crawled down Jackson Street to the intersection with Auburn Avenue he had the oddest sense that the future was rushing towards him. America was changing and sooner or later the peoples of American were going to wake up to a different country. Sooner or later that change might have happened anyway; the October War and last month’s Battle of Washington had pressed the ‘fast-forward’ button, and brought the civil rights agenda to a head.
Here in Atlanta the place from which a century ago
William Tecumseh Sherman’s Union Army had set off through Georgia on its ‘March to the Sea’, only a fool or a charlatan or a diehard Klan bigot could still believe that the hundred year old post-Civil War settlement which had unjustly disenfranchised and disadvantaged millions of men, women and children simply because of the color of their skin, was anything other than fundamentally wrong. Although Bobby Kennedy did not hear many people saying it out loud, not yet, one day they would shout it out aloud in their thousands and millions and when they did, he planned on being there to hear the thunder of righteous voices. Here in Atlanta and elsewhere in the South, countless whites and blacks alike had realized that their futures were inexplicably intertwined, and that the old ways which had so recently killed so many of their fellow Americans, were unsustainable in the new age.
The Attorney General’s personal apotheosis had come upon him late. He had grown up in the hothouse of northern Democratic Party politics, suspicious of and forever mindful that Southern Democrats weren’t like him; it had not been until he and Jack had been on the election trail and of necessity courted exactly that southern constituency that the reality of life in the Deep South nearly a hundred years after the abolition of slavery in the Union and the end of the Civil War, had really stuck in his craw. This was his fifth visit to Atlanta since the October War and nothing in politics – very little in life in fact - had given him more pride and satisfaction than his association and his developing friendship with the extraordinary man to whom the massive crowd had come to look to for hope.
Something remarkable was happening across the Deep South. Yes, religious and racial bigotry, segregation and countless injustices remained ingrained, entrenched within the fabric of the South but increasingly, the Civil Rights movement was being embraced by poor whites who shared the privations of the larger part of the colored community, and by middle class whites who just wanted to live in peace with their neighbours. For every diehard red neck bigot there were many more decent, pragmatic souls who – rocked by the near disaster of the October War which had robbed them of the certainties of their former lives, and frankly, who had been terrified by the spectre of Washington burning – had privately seen the light. All men were equal in the sight of God; and all men were the same flesh and bone beneath the skin.
