by James Philip
The Attorney General said nothing.
“The news will get out sooner or later,” his deputy continued, telling his boss exactly what he already knew but really did not want to hear.
“If you’re worried about it I’ll draft you a waiver to the effect that you were working under my orders for national security reasons,” Bobby Kennedy offered.
“Dammit, Bobby!” The other man barked. “I don’t want a get out of jail pass on this one! I want the Administration to be able to claim that the Vice-President was fully cognisant of Jack’s ‘problem’ and that he was ready to step up to the plate ‘at any time’ if the worst happened.”
The President’s younger brother instantly raised a hand in apology.
“Sorry, Nick. If this goes on much longer somebody will have to talk to LBJ. You’re absolutely right. But give it a few more days. The White House Press Office is going to put out a release about Jack having come back from Texas with a bout of influenza. You know, the normal thing, he’s been laid low but he’s recuperating and the normal operation of the Administration has not been disrupted. That ought to stop the media poking around for a few more days. In the meantime the National Security team at the White House has things under control and...”
Bobby Kennedy’s voice trailed off because the United States Deputy Attorney General was giving him a sardonically quizzical look.
He redrew his last comment.
“Well. Yes, okay. The National Security team has things as under control as they have been for the last thirteen months, leastways.”
Chapter 19
Friday 29th November 1963
Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, California
Lieutenant Walter Brenckmann had been more than a little surprised when he discovered that the traumatised country club waitress and the blond aide to the Governor of California already knew each other. This being the case he was not surprised when Miranda Sullivan peremptorily decided that the rest of the ‘interview’ would be conducted outside in the garden behind the old house situated within a stone’s throw of the University campus.
Their FBI hosts were upset.
“It isn’t safe in the grounds.”
“Rubbish,” Miranda Sullivan decided. She treated the G-men’s subsequent terse objections with what amounted to imperious contempt. After about a minute of batting the problem around the back parlour of the big wood-framed house the FBI had appeared briefly to have caved in. Then there was a new argument about whether an agent should ‘supervise’ the ‘discussions’.
Inside, outside, with or without an FBI minder present mattered not one jot to Walter Brenckmann. He wanted to hear what Darlene Lefebure had to say so he could write up his report, get on with organising the ceremonial arrangements for Admiral Braithwaite’s funeral, and hopefully, sometime before Christmas, get home to visit his mother and younger brother, Dan, in New England. However, Miranda Sullivan clearly had a completely different agenda and once she got into her stride she was a real force of nature.
The FBI had no chance.
It was pleasantly cool in the garden. The lawn had once been carefully trimmed at regular intervals, but bushes and shrubs, weeds and vines had begun to encroach and a high, newly-erected timber plank fence now enclosed the area behind the house.
Miranda led the naval officer and the ashen faced, shorter, slightly younger woman beyond the chairs on the patio and away from the building.
“Is there something you ought to be telling me, Miss Sullivan?” Walter inquired lowly.
“The house is probably bugged,” she explained testily. “And I didn’t want to advertise the fact that Miss Lefebure and I have met before. Although, at that time – the time when we met, that is - we did not know each other’s names.”
Walter was clearly intrigued and this further vexed the tall blond.
“It was you!” Darlene Lefebure hissed. “I thought it was!”
“It was at a party on the night of the war,” Miranda whispered, trying not to let her agitation become overly apparent to the watching FBI men.
Walter Brenckmann took a mental step back, reminding himself why he was here in Berkeley.
“Does that have any bearing on what we’re doing here today?” He asked flatly.
“No!” Miranda reconsidered. “I don’t know.”
“What happened to Dwayne after that night?” The other woman demanded, almost pleading with Miranda.
“Dwayne?”
“My boyfriend!” Darlene Lefebure cried it so loudly that the Special Agents circling the trio at a safe distance all turned to look at them. “Dwayne John? The black boy I was with that night at Johnny Seiffert’s place?”
The blood, which had briefly drained from Miranda’s face, now returned with a rush flushing her cheeks near crimson.
“Dwayne John? I didn’t know his name, sorry.”
Darlene Lefebure’s face creased into a childish scowl.
“What do you mean? You didn’t know his name? After I went out that night the police told me to go back inside. When I went back to Johnny’s place Dwayne was on top of you!” The shorter woman’s eyes glittered with outraged hostility. “Your ankles were crossed behind his neck!”
Walter Brenckmann wrongly imagined, for a moment, that he got the picture. He opened his mouth to suggest that perhaps this was neither the time nor the place for the two women to resolve their little ménage à trois situation with ‘Dwayne John’, whoever he was. However, he got no opportunity to inject what he hoped was an element of reason into the discussion.
Events had gathered their own inexorable pace by then.
“You didn’t even notice I was there until I started screaming!” Darlene Lefebure hissed, squaring up to Miranda as if she was about to slap or claw at her face.
“I was,” Miranda started to reply.
“The first thing these guys,” Darlene Lefebure cut her off angrily, “asked me about when they brought me here was Dwayne. They’ve got him in a lockup someplace across the Bay. They’re trying to get him sent back to Jackson for kidnapping, raping and transporting a minor across a state line! They said if I don’t do what they say it’ll be bad for Dwayne!”
Walter was so stunned by this development that he spoke before he let his brain work through the possibilities.
“This man? Dwayne John? He abducted and raped a minor, a child?”
“No!” The young woman with the lazy, southern drawl spat angrily. “Me! He never kidnapped me and he sure as Hell didn’t have to rape me! I was only twenty when I came out here with Dwayne. We knew we couldn’t ever have any life back in Jackson. There was nothing for us in Alabama. We couldn’t even hold hands on the street and my folks said they’d throw me out and disown me if I ever saw him again. So we ran away. We like, eloped, except we never did the marrying thing. We reckoned that out here on the West Coast things wouldn’t be great but at least we wouldn’t get our house burned down if we moved in together. If anybody had found out Dwayne had laid a finger on me back in Jackson he’d have been lynched. Anyway, so we ran away. But then Dwayne got in with that,” she was going to say something profoundly un-Christian, thought better of it, “man, Johnny Seiffert, and being a backing singer on a couple of records sort of turned Dwayne’s head, and things just got out of hand.” She glared at Miranda. A moment later she stabbed a pointing, accusative finger at the taller woman. “And then that bitch took Dwayne away from me!”
Walter scratched his head.
This was surreal in a way that the night of the war onboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt had never been. Methodically shooting off the boat’s Polaris A2 missiles at intervals of two to three minutes had seemed like a bizarre peacetime exercise. All those megatons of death bursting from the Theodore Roosevelt’s silos with a whoosh of compressed air, breaking the surface, blasting skywards at ever increasing velocities, all of that had been so clinical, disconnected with Armageddon. Afterwards, the boat had run deep, nobody had talked overmuch. What was there to sa
y?
“I did no such thing!” Miranda protested hopelessly, her voice a shrill, angry hiss. “I didn’t take Dwayne away from you! He couldn’t wait to fuck me stupid! Besides, I was completely out of my head! We all were! I haven’t seen him since that night. I didn’t even know what his name was until just now. After you found us together that night Johnny threw us both out onto the street at gun point!”
Walter was beyond head scratching now.
“Okay...”
The women looked daggers at him for his temerity in intruding into their personal space.
The Navy man was not to be put off so easily.
“This fellow Dwayne John,” he inquired doggedly, “does he have anything at all to do with what happened to Rear Admiral Braithwaite and his wife on Sequoyah Road earlier this week?”
The women stopped looking daggers at him; instead they looked at him with pitying patience as if he was the village idiot.
“Of course not!” They chorused before they let their brains process the question he had just asked.
“No, I don’t think so,” Darlene Lefebure said, without confidence.
Walter had much preferred ‘of course not’ to that answer.
He made a determined effort to sound like an officer and a gentleman: “Well, perhaps, if you told me what you saw the other day, Miss Lefebure.”
A somewhat strained normality briefly asserted itself.
“I work at the Sequoyah Country Club but the bus that runs from Mountain Boulevard to Skyline Boulevard doesn’t detour onto Sequoyah Road, so I have to get off at the Keller Avenue intersection and walk the rest of the way to the clubhouse.”
“You are a waitress, I gather?”
Darlene Lefebure nodded, crossed her arms across her breasts as if she was cold.
“I’ve worked there the last six months. The money’s not great but it’s steady, you know?”
“Were you early, late or about on time on Monday afternoon?”
“I was late. I clean house for an old lady over on in Eastmont most mornings and on Monday she wanted to talk. She’s getting old and her kids don’t come round often.”
“So you were late. How late?”
“Ten minutes. I was hurrying, out of breath when I saw the car, a big black Chrysler, pull off the road. I was coming around the corner from Keller Avenue. Maybe seventy or eighty yards away.”
“What did you see, Miss Lefebure?”
“I saw this tall guy in uniform get out for the driver’s door. He walked round to the trunk. I thought maybe the car had a flat and he was getting something out of the trunk, but...”
“In your own time,” the man assured the young woman. Darlene Lefebure was curvy, plain, her face freckled, a complete contrast to Miranda Sullivan’s leggy, slender beauty. She was self-conscious, unnerved by the attention, eager to reach out and grab any hand which promised a scintilla of support and friendship.
“I didn’t really believe it when he shut the trunk and he was suddenly pointing a shot gun, one of those pump action ones, at the back windows of the Chrysler. He just started firing, on and on and on. And then he stopped, reloaded and walked around the side of the car and fired some more.”
The Oakland PD report estimated as many as a dozen shots had been fired – 20 gauge – into the car. Rear Admiral Jackson Braithwaite had been killed by a shot to the back of his head. It was likely that his wife, Dolores, had still been alive when the assassin walked around to the side of the Chrysler to riddle both passengers with a second fusillade.
“Did the gunman see you, Miss Lefebure?”
The woman nodded jerkily.
“But he didn’t fire at you?”
“I ran into the woods. That’s where the Oakland PD found me a while later.”
“How close did you get to the Chrysler, Miss Lefebure?”
“Maybe twenty-five, thirty yards. I kept on walking, it was like I was in a dream, only I was so frightened... I wet myself...”
“Quite natural,” Walter assured her gently, seeing the tears welling in the young woman’s eyes. “How soon after the murders did the FBI bring you here?” The question was thrown into the mix, a casual afterthought that was anything but casual in its intent.
“That night. A couple of Special Agents came into the room the second time the Oakland PD guys interviewed me.”
“Special Agents?”
“All the Feds dress the same,” Darlene Lefebure explained patiently.
“The dark jackets and white shirts,” Walter half-smiled and the woman reciprocated in kind.
“Yeah, and they had that look they give people.”
Nobody at Alameda had even known that Rear Admiral Braithwaite was missing until the next day. He had failed to return to the base that afternoon for a routine meeting – which should have started the alarm bells ringing – but the senior officer of the station, the executive officer of the USS Hunley had deputised for him in the absence at sea of SUBRON Fifteen’s second-in-command and his own captain. That afternoon the Hunley’s commanding officer had been attending a conference with contractors at Mare Island.
The news of a shooting near the Sequoyah Country Club had been on the news on Monday night but there had been no details, no mention of a senior US Navy officer and his wife having been the victims. In fact there had been a news blackout on the details for nearly thirty-six hours; yet he FBI had turned up within a few hours of the killing?
Walter decided the sooner he handed this one off to the US Navy’s Special Investigation Branch the better; in fact he was beginning to ask himself why SIB were not all over this already? Of course, the way things had been lately, for all he knew the entire SIB division of the Navy Department had been abolished or ‘mothballed’ along with two-thirds of the surface fleet and seven of the ten biggest aircraft carriers ever built. From where he and his comrades in SUBRON Fifteen had sat the defence policy of the United States of America seemed to have been condensed down to a strategy of ‘mess with us and Strategic Air Command and the Polaris Fleet will turn your country into rubble’. If the October War had taught the movers and shakers in Washington DC anything, it was that the age of conventional, non-nuclear warfare was over. If that was the case; who needed big grey surface ships, fighter-bombers, armoured divisions or all those expensive military bases and naval dockyards?
Miranda Sullivan coughed loudly.
Walter had been indulging in an uncharacteristic bout of daydreaming.
“I do apologise,” he smiled to Darlene Lefebure. “You mentioned that your, er, boyfriend, Dwayne John, was being held for crimes he allegedly committed against you?”
“The FBI said there was an Alabama State extradition warrant out for Dwayne.”
Walter Brenckmann turned to Miranda.
“Is there any such thing, Miss Sullivan?”
“I have no idea. I’m not a lawyer.” It was only after she had uttered the impatient put down that she realised what the Navy man had actually just asked her. “I’ll check it out with the California State Attorney General’s Office when I get back to Sacramento,” she promised, a little chastened.
“I’m sure that would help put Miss Lefebure’s mind partly at ease,” he said with the air of a man who has been done an enormous favour. “I’m not a lawyer either, of course. But it does seem to me that unless Miss Lefebure was prepared to voluntarily return to Alabama to testify against Mr John that the whole ‘extradition’ thing is somewhat academic?”
“You’re probably right. I’ll look into it.”
Darlene Lefebure’s eyes had darted from one face to the other, like a spectator watching a tennis match following the ball zinging from one side of the net to the other.
“I don’t like it here,” she blurted. “Can they keep me here?”
“I’ll check that out too with the State Attorney General’s Office,” Miranda assured her. Knowing this was no comfort to the other woman she dug in her handbag, pulled out a notebook and scrawled a number on it. She
tore out the page. “If you don’t hear anything by this time tomorrow you can call that number. It is my office number. If I am not there you can leave a message.”
“You mean it?”
Miranda nodded.
“Yes,” she said simply, hardly believing that she actually meant it.
Chapter 20
Friday 29th November 1963
Gretsky’s, Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles
Judy had fallen in love with Gretsky’s and Laurel Canyon at first sight. Much like the way she had with Sam Brenckmann, possibly because Gretsky’s, Laurel Canyon and Sam were so completely different to anything and anybody she had known before in her thirty-one years. Gretsky’s had felt like home from day one and not just because she and Sam had been on the road – on the run from something or other – for nearly three months by then. Sam had described Laurel Canyon, the ramshackle house, the sunshine and the people she would meet in Los Angeles to keep her spirits up; but being with him had been the thing that had kept her going. He said they had kept each other going but she had no illusions that but for Sam she would be dead now.
Judy shivered every time she remembered how unwilling she had been to get out of Bellingham. She had never really been anywhere else, she had visited Vancouver and Seattle a few times, otherwise Bellingham was all she knew and Bellingham people were the only people she knew of, or remotely understood. Sam, for all that he was six years her junior and in many ways a self-confessed air head, was infinitely less trusting of strangers and hugely more worldly wise.
Sam had taken one look at the people flocking into Bellingham in the days after the October War and said: ‘We have to get out of here, babe.’
The idea of leaving Bellingham had terrified Judy.
He had refused point blank to leave without her.
