“We’re not best friends,” the Sheriff says. “We’re both in Rotary and I have a meal at the hotel a couple of times a month. Sometimes lunch, sometimes dinner. I can tell you that the kitchen staff there are Royce’s doing. He imported them from the Bay Area and it’s putting the hotel on the map.
“In fact, I know that’s what Royce is shooting for. The hotel was always the hub of the community, but Royce is reaching out. He’d like it to be the hub for vacationers in this part of the Mother Lode. Yosemite is an easy day trip from here. A big chunk of the Mother Lode is within a few hours drive. Even in winter, some of the ski areas are close. Royce sees his business base as the Bay Area and he’s willing to use his grandfather’s name and fame to help him get it.” Dodson sounds like he approves of this.
I stop making squiggles on my pad. His grandfather? “Wait. When did he buy the hotel?”
“The deed says three years ago,” Clarice pipes in. “Before the Senator died. Has he used that connection the whole time?” The pink in Clarice’s face is gone and her “what are you hiding” look is back.
“He’s certainly traded on the Calvert name.” Dodson says. “I don’t know if the Senator’s death will make any difference. He was a Senator and war hero when he was alive and he’s still that—he’ll always be that—so I think the name’s the game. When you meet Royce at the hotel, spend some time in the lobby area. He’s got, well maybe not quite a shrine but surely a lot of memorabilia about the Senator.”
Dodson looks at his watch, a not-too-subtle reminder that we’re taking up time but not helping him along.
“I need to get going, I have a staff meeting this afternoon,” he says as he stands up and reaches for his jacket. “How about The Mountain Miner. They have a few lunch specials as well as sandwiches and salads and stuff.”
I’m taken aback. After all his talk of the food at the hotel?
“Is there some reason you don’t want to go to the hotel?” Clarice asks, ready to jump on his “I know and you don’t” routine?
“I just thought you’d be on better ground it you met him professionally, not as someone he’d just had as a guest for lunch,” Dodson says quizzically.
Oh duh, of course. It rocks me back and instantly brings Clarice’s pink tide, this time up to her eyebrows.
“Oh,” she says, in one of the littlest voices I’ve ever heard out of her mouth, “that’s a good judgment. The Mountain Miner sounds fine.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Lunch is good, as Dodson predicted. I pick up the tab and will charge it to the Press. There aren’t any perks with the brothers in charge but never taking anything, not even a shared lunch, from a source keeps the ethics line intact. And not being sued for taking bribes is language the brothers understand.
Conversation at lunch swirls around the usual getting-to-know-you topics. Places you’ve lived. Where you went to school. How you ended up in your career.
It’s no surprise to me that Clarice always wanted to be a journalist. It does surprise me that she considered television until she discovered being in front of a camera made her nervous. It seems odd that her chutzpah doesn’t carry over but there’s an anonymity to working in print media. Clarice uses this to ask the questions that push the limits of polite behavior. She’s not rude, just insistent...bordering on pushy.
Two things about Dodson do surprise me. First is that he has a master’s in public administration from USC. That’s unusual in a small town cop until I remember he’s spent time in LA. Probing that, I discover he knew my first husband, Vinnie. Surprise number two.
I probably shouldn’t be surprised. Even in the LA area there are only a small number of cops who are killed on duty and one who gets killed in a high-speed chase is remembered. Dodson knows the story and he’s sufficiently classy to leave it at that. It’s been long enough that I don’t fall apart any more, but there are still places that I just can’t go, particularly with cops.
My past is past; Clarice knows how I feel about mixing business and pleasure and that I’m concerned she’s heading down the same street I took with Vinnie. A minute of uneasy silence ends when the waiter asks if we want anything else.
I grab the check. We gather our stuff and head into the sunshine. I was right about the temperature, it’s just pleasant, probably in the low 80s with a breeze gentle enough to just stir the Chamber of Commerce flags lining Main Street.
“Thanks for the company and information,” I tell Dodson. “I’m always surprised that it’s such a small world.”
“Well, there are only a finite number of cops and reporters, even in California. I don’t think it’s unusual to run into folks you know, or more likely folks who know folks you know,” Dodson says with a trace of compassion. “It’s always nice to work with people who have something in common.”
He turns to Clarice who’s been strangely quiet. “Please call me if you have any questions about San Juan County crime. If you’re up here again, maybe we can have lunch or a drink.”
He nods and walks off, leaving Clarice red and speechless.
“Damn him! I don’t know what...why....why the hell he makes me feel like a kid in the company of adults! I’m fine with him on the phone, it’s all business. In person—it’s just like my brain slips into neutral. I don’t say anything stupid. I just don’t say much of anything.”
She actually stomps her foot, like a five-year-old in a temper. This is interesting, I’ve never seen her act like this.
“Not to worry, Clarice. All of us go through this. I’ve always called it limmerence. Not lust, not like, just a glimmer of a feeling. It might burst into a light show, but chances are it’s just going to fade away. Let’s go find our Mr. Royce Calvert.”
The Marshalltown Hotel is less than two blocks from the cafe and just four from the Courthouse and Dodson’s Sheriff’s Office. It sits on the corner of Main Street and Mine Run Street, the intersection that was the heart of Marshalltown for close to a century. It’s a three story stone and brick building that takes up all of the block and carries an aura of permanence. There are no workmen visible but an electric saw whines in the warm air.
We go in through the large main door and are instantly blind. The drapes in the lobby, the hall and the dining room off to the right are all pulled closed.
“This is the way it was last time I was here,” Clarice half-whispers. “It’s creepy but Royce says it cuts down on the heating and cooling bills.”
It is creepy. Not scary-creepy but old-creepy, as though generations of people are all clamoring for attention. You could cut history with a knife here.
“Can I help you?”
The voice comes from the left. When I turn, I realize that it’s the bar or cocktail lounge, a room large enough for a long bar, several tables and space for a dance floor.
“Hello Royce, do you remember me?” Clarice is over her Dodson-induced silence and is all business again. “I told you I was gonna come up again and here I am.”
She sticks her hand out, grabs his and says, “This is Amy Hobbes the managing editor of the Monroe Press. Amy this is Royce Calvert. His grandfather was Senator Robert Calvert and he’s the new owner of the Marshalltown Hotel.”
Good God, she’s back with a vengeance, she’s talking so fast she’s on the edge of babbling.
I stick my hand out to the youngish man who’s looking a little blown over by Clarice’s hurricane of words. “Hello Mr. Calvert, it’s nice to finally meet you.”
“Please, call me Royce,” Royce says with a smile that’s reminiscent of the Senator’s cocky grin. “And it’s good to meet you, too. What can I do for you?”
“I got interested in Marshalltown after Clarice was up here,” I say taking in the dim lobby. “We’re practically neighbors. I know we don’t do much coverage of Marshalltown so I decided to come up and see what’s here. Also, two recent murders stoked my interest.”
Royce paled and caught himself. What is it, I wonder? Fear, guilt, compassion, anger?
“It’s not just the murders,” I say. Now, quick, how to backtrack and get on this guy’s good side. It never helps to have any source think you’re part of the sensational tabloids.
“Ever since your grandfather died, I’ve spent time in the San Juan Room of our library, reading about the town and your family. I didn’t know that the Senator was from Marshalltown, and I’m sure our readers didn’t either. I’m still not sure what I want to do with all this information, but I’d like to have as much as possible. We may do a special section on the Senator and his Marshalltown background.”
It isn’t a lie, just a little quick thinking. I don’t know what I have in mind but I want to leave options. Anything for the Press will have to be run by the brothers so I can use them as the heavies for the decisions of what or what not to print. And anything I can glean for the possible book can be vetted later.
Royce relaxes and half smiles. “I didn’t mean to be cranky. I’ve been trying for the past three years to get some paper or magazine or TV show interested in coming up here to learn about us. No one’s come. Suddenly, bam. Two bodies and we’re on the tour.”
“We do want to know about the murders.” It’s Clarice, she’s back. “Both Baldwin and Boxer had ties to the hotel, right?”
“Joe Baldwin died in the hotel, that’s right,” says Royce, tensing again. “I let him sleep in the lobby area while it’s under construction. I called him the night watchman, but it was just so he didn’t think it was charity. He was usually too drunk to watch anything.
“Janice Boxer died after showing a cabin in the mountains. Her car went off the road. There’s a rumor going around that she was dead before that, so I guess the sheriff’s calling it murder. I knew her because she’s the one who helped me buy the hotel.”
Ha, now we’re getting there.
“One of the things I’d like to know is why you bought the hotel. Maybe even further back, why’d your family sell it?” I ask. “I know somebody else built the original, but your family owned it, and practically the town, for more than 100 years. What happened?”
“The Second World War happened,” Royce says.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Illinois, 1945
Henry Blomberg lied about his age. He was 17 when he joined the U.S. Army.
It wasn’t unusual during World War II, but Blomberg joined the Army in the fall of 1945. And Blomberg wasn’t an American.
Henry Blomberg had been born Heinrich Blumenberg in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1928. The Blumenbergs had lived in the city for better than 400 years and prospered through banking and trade. Heinrich’s father, Walter, was an academic, using his family’s money to pay for the big house below the castle.
It was a comfortable life. Servants took care of the family’s needs with the quietness of the fog off the river. The Blumenbergs tended to their art, music, philanthropies, friends and their children. Walter used some of his family’s vast art collection—including a Bruegal, a small Rembrandt and three Durer etchings—in his teaching. A Leonardo da Vinci working sketch held the place of honor in a drawing room and student tours always ended there
Heinrich was the baby and spoiled by everybody in the house. There was always someone around to read to him, play with him, take him down to the cathedral square for a frosted ginger cake.
When Heinrich was four, Germany got a new chancellor. Walter said that this chancellor was just an aberration.
“After all,” he said, “Germany is a country of culture. We have a long and rich history of science, art, music and literature. This Hitler is an uneducated boor with no culture but violence. The German people will come to their senses soon, mark my words, and this will not even make a footnote in the history books.”
Walter and his family would rue those words. Besides being educated, well-to-do and generous with their wealth, the Blumenbergs were Jewish.
Not that this set them apart from their neighbors. They weren’t observant. They spoke High German and didn’t know Yiddish. Walter didn’t own a prayer shawl and Sophie, Heinrich’s mother, only used her set of milk china during Passover. They didn’t celebrate the major Christian holidays, but made no fuss about it, planning family parties during Christmas, Lent and Easter.
By 1935, Heinrich’s family started feeling the weight of Hitler’s taxation on Jews. Those who could still afford it, and still had documentation, began to emigrate. They went to the United States and Palestine, hearing the Zionist promises of creating a new homeland. But the Blumenbergs stayed in Heidelberg.
“My family settled in this town in the sixteenth century,” Walter said. “I’m not uprooting our history, our ancestors, our ties to this glorious city because of some dolt who can’t even speak decent German. The German people will boot him out and when they do, we’ll still be here.”
The Blumenbergs were losing a vast amount of wealth, but life in the big house went on. Walter’s colleagues at the University were abashed when they asked him to leave campus, but sent him private students to tutor anyway. Sophie’s social lists were slimming down as her Christian friends declined invitations, more from fear of Nazi reprisals, they assured her.
For the children, things didn’t change until early November in 1938. Kristallnacht destroyed and then looted Jewish shops across Germany and Austria. This brought home to the Blumenbergs that this was beyond the “mere aberration” of 1933. Walter and Sophie called a family meeting, announcing ten-year-old Heinrich was going to a private school in the United States. He was going because he was the only one the Blumenbergs could get papers for, and now the only one they could afford to send.
Heinrich spent World War II isolated from news of his family and the events in Europe. His mother wrote him, asking friends to smuggle the letters out almost weekly at first then dwindling to a few a year. The last one he received from her was in November 1944. She and his father had been able to get to Berlin where they felt they’d be safe.
“I know the war is coming to a close. I know that Germany is losing,” she wrote. “We don’t get much accurate news, but you can feel a change in the atmosphere, particularly here in Berlin. When we left Heidelberg, your brothers chose to try and make it to Palestine and we had no choice but to let them. I fear that when this horrible war is over we will have lost most of our children, but you, dearest Heinrich, must keep yourself safe and well and healthy so that your Papa and I may hold you again.”
Heinrich was now Henry Blomberg, six months away from high school graduation, speaking English with a flat, mid-western twang picked up from the other students at the school in the Chicago suburbs and listening to American music. He missed his family, but the hole was healing and the memories of life of the big house were fading and fragmenting. He was still fluent in German, usually dreaming in the language, but his daily life, what he was more and more thinking of as his real life, was thorough-going American.
A month before graduation, the pictures and news from the German concentration camps started arriving in America. Like everybody else, he just couldn’t get his mind to understand and know what his eyes were seeing. This was his homeland. Germans were the educated, culturally rich people his father talked about. This vastness of death had been taking place in the beautiful green pastures near Munich and the wildness of the forests by Ravensbruck. The countryside of Germany, so lovely in places it made your heart ache, had been the scene of a horror that drove people mad.
The letters from Henry’s mother stopped with the one from Berlin. He couldn’t allow himself to think of possibilities. The news wasn’t coming because of the turmoil in Europe. Cities were destroyed, there was no train or bus service, highways and bridges were gone. Civilian government was non-existent in what had been the German Reich and ba
sic services like telephones and mail delivery were shaky in France and the Low Countries.
It would be easier and faster for him to start inquiries in the States than to try and contact any authorities in Germany. He started his search with the rabbi at the local synagogue, not a building he’d been very familiar with. The local Jewish leaders were trying to work together to compile lists of relatives who were missing, or hadn’t been heard from. Henry put his parents’ names and their last known address on the list, added his two brothers with the information that they had tried to escape to Palestine, and waited to hear something.
During the first week of June 1945, Henry was swept up in his high school graduation, a series of dances and parties given by his Chicago friends. With American food, he’d grown and filled out with 165 pounds on his 5’ 10” frame. He had a frank, open face and a ready smile that stretched to his blue eyes, and his curly light brown hair would have been unremarkable anywhere in the States. Girls were around and plentiful, but he hadn’t settled on any one in particular, preferring to go out with groups of both boys and girls. He didn’t give himself time to think of the past, falling into bed in the early morning hours after spending nights dancing
The music was enough to give joy and euphoria to the teens—the war was over in Europe and they could begin to plan their lives.
A good student with a knack for languages, history and art, Henry had applied at universities, finally choosing the University of Chicago. It was familiar, if he lived with his foster parents his scholarship would cover all the other costs, and it was noted for its liberal arts curriculum.
On a muggy day in late June, Henry’s foster mother called upstairs, “Telephone, Henry. It’s that rabbi you talked to about your parents.”
Though it was early, Henry was instantly awake and took the stairs at a speed that could break a leg.
Edited for Death Page 5
