Chapter 1
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The main room of the Victorian held the only working fireplace,
and had been left as an open crash pad where the curious or the soon-to-be fleeced could be isolated and studied to make sure
they weren’t reporters or cops: ‘the man’, ‘the fuzz’. Or more recently, as the hate and
disrespect from the outside world filtered in even to these back waters of the failed Social Experience, ‘the pigs’. It was a place Al knew too well from the nights he’d drank cheap wine,
played a guitar and strummed the numbed psyches as readily as he did the humming strings of the acoustical guitar, gaining
more information in a single evening that he could hold in his head at any one time, as the ‘silent’ dealers,
former Hippies themselves, who supplied the dwindling Haight were reported on, in awe, by the tiny fish they fed on; which
he gathered in the skein of his words and the offer of sexless attention they craved, allowing the minnows and the wan’na
be’s to ease out on the other side of the net. An undercover identity was too hard to build to waste it on the bait
fish. They who had deceived, as a means of making a living, wouldn’t be passive in learning that they in turn had been
deceived.
‘This is the bend in the river Daddy Egan told James Patrick und mae a’ boot.’ The dour Scots man
thought to himself as he shoved his hands in his pockets as he stood resolutely in the dirty foyer of the ruined Victorian
that had now become a crime scene. ‘The Lass has chosen one way; now I mu’st decide fer mae self, which way I
will go! ‘
As the chill of the
late afternoon, San Francisco sunshine poured into the messy hallway with the man in a dark brown monk’s robe the Scots
man shivered and half turned, careful to keep his back to the mirror over the battered end-table to keep as many of the huddled
hippies in the front room from getting a clear look at his face as he could. He’d already dropped out of the Flower
Child scene and gone to work on the docks as ‘the Mumbling man’ but there was a much larger connection alive within
him than he had sought to guess until this terrible moment, knowing that one of the young girl’s he’d laughed
and smoked pot with was upstairs dying, smiling herself to death, in a series of bizarre attacks against the fading fabric
of the Hashbury that seemed to have no purpose, nor end in sight.
Scarcely
pass his mid-twenties himself, Brother John Carbasian had seen more violence and divisive hatreds than most men twice his
age, surviving a bitter civil war in his own country of Lebanon then helping street-bound veterans of the cruel deceit in
Vietnam, and it showed in his well pronounced features; as gentle as the soul that was stretched to its breaking point within
the six-foot five frame.
His
companion, Allen MacKendrie Hoag, who arrived first by mere minutes, was a head and shoulders less at only five foot eight
when he could make his hunched shoulders to push upwards against the casual but expensive cloth of his outer coat, but the
tall, soft spoken man deferred to him like a Great Dane bossed from puppy hood by a Rat Terrier, long since out-distanced.
Although he heard and understood Al Hoag’s Scot stained accents better than most, Brother John was
stationary for several more seconds, standing in a pool of sunlight, without acknowledging the softly spoken instructions,
as immobile as a garden statue of Saint Francis de Assai. Dabbled in rare colored hues reflected by the sunlight’s passage
through the broken glass from colored bottles that had been frozen and forgotten in the ice box until the electricity was
cut off for lack of consistent payment, and the shattered glued to the lead crystal door inset as a handmade mosaic of reds
and greens and dull browns, several shades lighter than his robes. Its momentary beauty as illusionary as the failed social
experiment that gave them the right to exist apart from standardized reality. Staring up wordlessly at the bored Blue Suit
lounging near the top of the stairs as if he feared he’d be accosted and bullied as he often was by rookies who didn’t
known of him or his unique place on the streets between both worlds. But Al knew he would go upstairs to comfort the
dying girl, as she cursed them all to hell and pleaded for a knife to cut out her baby ‘while there was still time’
to save the doomed infant, all the while smiling with an angelic glow that Heaven itself might envy; just like the last two
who died in his arms. That was his way. Too bad his way didn’t carry more weight in the real world they shared outside
this lovely but deeply haunted Victorian on Pearl Street!
Just
as he knew he would face the bitter animosity of the waiting Flower Children forced to cluster in decidedly un-potted stances
since he was the first Detective on scene, and because he needed to cut himself against their self righteous anger, since
he’d had little or no luck in severing the bonds shackling his wrists merely by will power. There were too many things
he admired about the original movement, and he was too tired, too close to retirement to just turn and walk away, even though
Norris Cheel would have been much better than he at this, and actually enjoyed the use of his power to intimidate the children
of well-to-do, absent parents at will. Cheel had made sure the whole Cop House on Stanton Street had heard his boastful pronouncements
that this day would come; implying that if he were right in this, he was right about the whispers he kept alive among every
newly arriving Blue Suit that Al had gotten away with murder back in ‘57.
But neither of them wished for the inevitable moment to begin. When Brother John took the first stair up the faded
but still luxurious carpeting of Loraine Devlon’s communal home, Al followed the trace of her perfume and began to walk
toward the front room which was now littered with smelling mattresses scattered about the floor between the burn marks of
cigarettes and candles that burned away all their wax unnoticed while their drugged keepers watched the display of interior
aerial dynamics only they comprehended. He didn’t dare to start to breath again until he saw She wasn’t there!
*
Life and Death sat quietly waiting on either side of the man
who dressed in the simple robes of Saint Francis de Assisi to illustrate his conscious abandonment of the world which
had lead the young expectant mother to the hour of her death. A Lebanese Christian, ordained as a minister in a small sect
which asked and expected the compassion of the Incarnate Christ to the best of one’s abilities, Brother John was in
a unique place to help minister to the spiritual and occasionally to the physical needs of the Flower Children who lingered
in Loraine Devlon’s commune on Pearl Street long after the social experience which spawned it had evolved into a new
state of being which held no place for these last holdouts for a non-commercial and gentle life style based on drugs and youthful,
if false optimism the Founders had long since rejected.
At this moment, he watched the quiet approach of the undercover narcotics agents that the members of Loraine Devlon’s
commune on Pearl Street knew only as the Mumbling Man; whom they assumed was a deaf mute since he seldom reacted to what was
said around him, and carried a small notebook whose sheets he tore out to scribble simple messages when gestures wouldn’t
sufficient to get his appoint across. He found himself as chillingly aware of the regret and pained sadness cloaking the weary
man’s eyes as he was of the expectant girl’s willingness for death to finally release her from a life too painful
to hold unto any longer, knowing that he was helpless to do anything to resolve the dilemma for either of them, or his own
soul fir that matter, as he listened to her painful gasps as the preliminary false start of labor forced the chemical flooding
of extra pleasure endorphins on a brain already painfully surfeit, killing her with pleasure!
The usually playful giant wanted to be angry! At the filthy beast who’d done this deliberately to a shy, painfully
idealistic girl, eight and a half months pregnant, at the System which had ignored her needs as long as she was ambulatory
and verbal if abusive to it, at the Mumbling Man for being here now while she was still breathing and conscious even of death
was irreversible at this point in her suffering as she smiled herself to death under the hypnotic effect of the powerful psychedelic,
because Big Al could only solve her murder, he couldn’t prevent it now! At himself, for assuming
the natural concern of a mother-to-be would override Cheryl Ann’s naturally optimistic
expectation for the goodness of others
and their actions, given her own personality.
Life stood up with as great a regret at the loss as the man cloaked in sorrow and the brown robes of a simple mink
and left quietly with the childlike sigh of the unwed mother, as the taunt, bloated body eased out of the heightened arc of
attempted escape and Death took the place the young mother had clung too for the last forty-eight hours.
The smile
that caused her bruised lips to twist in cruel victory also caused his fingernails to draw blood from Brother John’s
palms as the Mumbling Man forced open the lean, tapered fingers and pressed them against the raised ridged of burn ands scar
tissue of his own; together they wept at the door of the walk-in closet which the girl had optimistically rented in expectation
of Welfare checks as a subsidy, as the odors of bowel and urine signified the immutable end of the struggle to maintain Cheryl
Ann Unknown last name’s place on the roll of the living, though her features remained as soft and supple in the first
moments of her death as they had in the short sixteen weeks of her previous form of existence in the Victorian
house on Pearl, near Haight and Ashbury Streets, June 19th, 1968 The sixth victim, of how many
others of the shadowy figure the local press enthusiastically championed as “The Blue Smiler Killer of the Haight Ashbury”
by the trace of blue left on his/her victim’s tongue and the manner of their apparently benign death.
Al Hoag bristled when the
morgue team claimed to claim the body that no ambulance carrier would agree to transport. He had made the man and woman wait
until Brother John finished the sacred Last Rites he’d promised Cheryl Ann, whose parents, whose names she refused to
divulge, were active Catholics. And whom she felt would find comfort in knowing their youngest daughter had received the respect
due to the dead. Then Al made them wait because John Carbasian found that having sat there in one position for over an hour,
he couldn’t walk properly till they were almost to the end of the second flight of stairs. And then they waited in the
foyer, waiting for everything to be prepared before they allowed the last four quail to be flushed from their unkempt nest.
Al kept his voice low when he and Brother John meet again at the stoned Spanish Title leading the way into the unusually
quiet house, even though there wasn’t else in the littered hallway or in view from the top of the curved staircase.
Those who weren’t to be released on their own recognizance were downstairs in the communal kitchen.
It
was clear from the man’s deeply ingrained accent why he was known on the docks and here in the ‘Ashbury’
only as The Mumbling Man, but it was also clear to the man known as Brother John, that he’d never spent his youth in
the war torn Middle East under armed surveillance and racial hatred as he had! When being six-foot three at twelve years of
age qualified him for the beatings and epitaphs usually reserved only for bearded man like him.
“ Let him come! Let him see me face-to-face! We’ll see who exits smiling!
“
There was nothing sexual
in the man’s intimate brush of his palm across the seated man’s face and neck, but a compassion shared between
brother-in-arms in the midst of combat, and oddly the giant found he liked the quiet Scot. He hadn’t been sure over
the last two years, with the way Big Al could simply fade into the background and make no attempt to dissuade these youths
from spoiling the lives. Even though, he’d batted a thousand per cent loss himself. By the time they were marked by
the Streets there was no going back to being somebody body’s little girl or little boy and playing by all the rules,
the fair ones or not. To keep a roof over their head and contribute to the food and the social exchange demanded in a complex
society like a hippie commune was a high class commitment many of the drug bunnies were simply unable to maintain any longer.
Preferring instead to allow time and fate to move them from somebody’s floor or a dirty bedroom in some hallway to the
next, without real concern. Night came, you got warm, you slept, if you were lucky, you partied.
‘ Let f __king tomorrow f__ take care of itself, it was enough to keep enough food from pan handling, the occasional
straight John on the street, or the baloney sandwiches from the street based Ministries of the store front churches keep body
and soul together till you sucked it and listened to the sermon at the Mission so you could shower and eat in peace,
for at least one night. And if worse came to worse, pretended to listen to one of Brother John’s personalized sermons
so you crash inside the church and stay warm and not be stiffed for the night.’
“ There’s no’ thing more ye can do fer her, except come wid mae und help
mae understand what’s she’s done and where she went the last three days. Because in one of those faces, we’ll
find her killer, Brother John! “
“ The one in the toga is Orin Devlon, Loraine’s twin. But I assume ye already know that?
“
“
I know of him yes, I’ve never had the privilege. “
The burly Scot allowed his raised brow speak for him. Sometimes he felt irked at John’s conscious attempts to
speak nice or not speak at all. He would have had to be a lot more silent than he always was if he tried to follow that
little tenet of the quiet man’s faith!
“ He’s rich enough tae also wear the label of ‘eccentric’ und ‘untouchable’.
But sometimes I wonder if he is nay standing tae close tae the edge of his playacting, in making such a hero out of Nero,
whom he may or may not serious fancy that he resembles. They were both chubby, I’ll give’m that. “
At the returned favor of an arched eyebrow from his friend, the Scots man cleared his throat nervously and pointed
out the other two men that John might not know front he early days of the Summer of Love when Loraine Devlon still lived here
and was making a genuine attempt to provide a safe place for the free flowing creativity that marked the first season of dreams
on the Haight. There were four girls, women in experience, who’d kept the hive flowing in the right direction, stinging
to death the competition and the ones who went home to their parents in forty-eight hours, no matter how sour the relationship
they left. It would be the jumping off place for another leap toward the illusive dream of freedom, but it wouldn’t
be done on the windy and cold streets of San Francisco, no matter what the pretty sons on the popular radio band implied.
The Diggers had dug themselves into communes in Taos, or Oregon, or places where strangers were so few they didn’t have
to stay grounded just to keep out the Narcs like him.
The women had the foulest mouths and the most concrete suggestions about what he should do to himself and how to do
it, and John stepped away first, watching the ice grow an inch thicker on the Scots man’s face as he pretended to be
bored with their vile threats when John knew that his heart was breaking for every foul thing which had lead them to this
moment, and this kind of knowledge and hate.
Orin Devlon timed his urinary dysfunction to allow him to witness the precautions the body retrieval team went though
to prevent any of the ‘stray’ blue powder from entering their lungs and killing them in the same slow and agonizing
manner. And it only made him smile and giggle all the more with delight. In his heart he bore the absolute conviction that
it was the Hand of Destiny that lead his to find the stolen apothecary’s bottle in his sister’s underwear drawer,
where she still hid things, as if Sam Lovich gave a rip for her ass one way or the other after ‘Poppo’
crapped out on them, by-passing their father Weak William, to leave his entire fortune to Al’s son Matthew, whom Sam
was knowing raising as his own heir, since that gave him de facto rule over the sprawling conglomerate!
His heart beat with such
wild palpitations that he had a hard time keeping his urine stream with the confined of the yellow and brown circle somewhere
beyond his half-closed eyes. There was only one of Tara Tige's Himalayan Strangleroot
pill left, and after several failed attempts, he’d managed to make a copy he couldn’t tell from the real thing.
As soon as he could get Sissy to stay in one place long enough he was going to slip them on her and take the other one himself.
He hadn’t yet decided on the word or action which would define which of the indistinguishable blue pills would go to
her and which to him, but the thought of painlessly ending his life with a beatific smile made him wish he were as talented
a poet and playwright as Nero!
He
started to zip up his pants when he remembered he’d left them at the hotel. With a curse worthy of a god, he peeled
back the four layer of underpants he wore and adjusted each other carefully as the uniformed officer on the other side of
the door kept pounding and trying to hurry him. But great minds always had to deal with inferior beings, the world was full
of them. But five less, now thanks to them, he thought with a certain smug satisfaction even though washing each finger four
times in the proper sequence was interrupted once by a banging on the door and several foul references to perverts and body
parts and he had to start all over again!
He glanced in the speckled mirror and smoothed down the few remaining hairs on his head. He looked closer to sixty
than to thirty but he wasn’t either and he doubted he’d make it to the latter. Then a sudden look of innocence
on his own darling features stopped him short…unless Sissy got the poison pill, in which case, he’d still have
the goal that initiated his participation in murder, He’d still have achieved his goal of no longer being halved!
Al was rigid with anger, knowing that the creepy and
soft man openly admiring him was delaying as long as possible to force him to be here when Loraine arrived. A thing he would
have avoided if it meant giving all but his last liter of blood! He made up for it by conspicuously leaning over to the grief
stricken and weary man beside him, making no attempt to hide the fact that he was mocking the watching nymph in make-up and
brilliantly embroidered toga
“
He does everything in fours. He even wears four pairs of underpants, ‘tidy whities’ I’m told; but
the last pair he wears facing the wrong way to protect his modesty should a cold wind whip up from Alcatraz und…
“
“ Al!
“ Broken John demanded in crimson-faced rebuke. “ If you have that
much interest in what the man wears, maybe you should consider getting a life! “
To Brother John’s horror, the Scots man doubled over in genuine laughter, holding his sides as tears of laughter
streamed down his cheeks for several minutes. Gasping and still holding his sides between gasps of “Oy! That hurts!”
and “I haven’t laughed so long I think I’ve pulled a muscle!” and several failed attempts at speaking
that broke up into redoubled gales of laughter before he could finally calm his chest muscles and repeated fits of laughter
to explain.
“ At furst
I thought ye told me if I had that mu’ch interest in the man’s clothes I should get mae self a wife!
“
In spite of his best
efforts, Al’s battlefield humor won out, and John cracked a smile.
Orin remained very pleased with himself at the discomfort and inconvenience he was causing the anonymous Blue Suits
who still thought they could inhale the dust and start smiling until he noticed the tall, dark man in the brown monk’s
robes watching him from the corner of the soiled divan under the sun draped window. His swelling member, barely hidden under
his cupped hand shriveled and sank down with alarming haste as he swore the man knew! But he couldn’t? How could he?
Unless….
Loraine Devlon
Lovich was just coming into the door as they neared the widest step at the end of the massive, Victorian adored wooden staircase.
She looked the part of the successful business executive that had taken her away from this house and its inner turmoil’s
for weeks at a time. She was wrinkling her nose in disgust at the closed in odors of unwashed bodies, a toddler allowed to
run free with out diapers during the questioning and the unmistakable odor of burnt vegetable oil from the kitchen at the
back of the narrow hall extending from the well-lighted foyer.
It wasn’t until he was trying to fold himself into the passenger side of the Scots man’s red Mustang hardtop
that it occurred to him Al hadn’t even tried to speak to the woman of his fourteen year old son, and he wondered to
himself, since his thoughts were still full of the dead girl and the unborn baby they’d been forced to leave in the
house until her discovery by someone in the House itself, if that was to preserve his role as the Mumbling man because she’d
certainly recognize him in a minute even with the bristling black beard, or because he had no use for the woman she’d
become as Samuel “the Snake” Lovich’s wife since his son Matthew Lovich’s birth?
Loraine Lovich hadn’t
been with her twin though they’d waited outside for another fifteen minutes to see if Orin Devlon would arrive? Which
was odd only when you considered how unnaturally bonded they were. They were never in the same place together, sometimes not
even in the same city when one of these murders happened, so it would have been a wholesome break in the bizarre routine if
just once, they had been. Until the fourth victim was a girl, he’d half feared her anger towards
men [other than her beloved twin] was making her appear more and more solid as the potential murderer. Poison is more often
a woman’s choice of weapon.
‘ Sorry I’m later for dinner, son. I was just proving yer m’other is the
killer o’ five...six young people. Do ye happen
tae know if they were late wid this month’s rent? ‘He mocked himself. But it couldn’t dislodge the
love he still held for her, try as he might.
‘ Al? Why are you trying to hurt me? ‘
The girl’s high pitched voice assailed from his memory as he slammed the car door shut and stood in the first
light of day as the cab drove the monk-like figure back to his abandoned church on the edge of Fillmore Street. He was talked
out form the things said and left unsaid by the other three members of the investigative team. He didn’t even try to
answer her memory from a day similar to this over fourteen years ago as he held his only child in his arms, still warm and
mottled with the fluids of his mother’s body. ‘ Why are you going to let them take my baby
from me? ‘
Then a stray wind rose
up sharply from the Eucalyptus trees and the first of three commuter’s discourse through the early morning hours after
dawn, and his hands clinched, thinking of the dollar store laundry basket the dead girl had sewn a baby blanket into for the
child who would died without being expelled from her womb.
“
Because yer more o’ a child at eighteen than she was a ‘sixteen. I didn’t want tae take Wee Mattie
from ye, but ye were willing tae gave the son of mae flesh tae a’ nother man to buy what love could no!
“
In the end Weak Willie
had fought to keep Loraine from forcing him to raise his grandson, and Samuel Lovich had the time for neither the woman
nor another man’s seed once both accomplished what he wanted, a union with the crippled bastard who ran Devlon Corporation
with the same cruel tyranny he destroyed the living flesh and soul of his own family. It was so easy that his only real regret
was the hours of angst he put his older brother James Patrick through, or the hours Zee Rowan and Herb Baer commiserated with
him while they were still friends, and their marriages and unions were so blessed by competent, fertile mates that they could
afford to drop of few drops of cooling water on his burning tongue.
For just that instant he hated them and himself almost as much as he hated his job as a cop. And yet, in his heart
he knew that if this kind of legal but sordid job didn’t exist, he would have had to invent it in a vain effort to expropriate
his need of redemption.
‘ Daddy? Throw the ball for me! ‘
He heard a boy’s voice call from his memory and he was standing in front of a birch log cabin at the edge of
a lake, and there was an older plump woman straightening between trim rows of vegetables she grew in the short summer season
each year. And he knew it was him. Egan and Mary were alive in that instant to remind him of what they attempted to teach
both boys, even in the unchartered wilderness of the Saskatchewan. Life is what you make it.
But seeing the soft headlights touch into the fog at the top of the hill even before the car itself became visible,
he didn’t wait to try and imagine what the ex-Mounties’s answer might have been. It was only a game in his mind,
but having been next to Brother John in the doorway of that converted, walk in closet, so near the giant’s determined
gift for Life and validating it in others, he felt a pull, as if something had just pulled from between the teeth of the inner
clogs of his being and the wheels, stuck in place with his young wife’s death eighteen years ago, were beginning to
turn again, ever so slowly!
But
then, Brother John had that effect on everyone, even though he was unaware of it. Who could say how long the feeling would
last?
As
he drove up the narrow alleyway past the Baer’s house fronting on Franklin Street and was swallowed up by the hedges
that grew top the second story window of the neighboring house, he tried to remember not to slam the car door. Though he was
inside the garage, Betty claimed it echoed directly into her bedroom and woke her.
How did you call a friend of twenty-three years a liar without breaking the last fragile strand that connected him
to his best friend’s wife? Even inside the small one bedroom ‘mother-in-law’s cottage’ Al slipped
off his soiled shoes and left his socks on, tip toeing around the stillness filled apartment and being careful not to make
the condiment’s bottles knock against one another as he eased shot the empty refrigerator door. He’d have to go
grocery shopping as soon as he got up.
Throwing
himself to the overstuffed couch, with its vague but welcoming smells that slowly replaces the stenches of the docks and the
overwhelming sweetness of “Brute” , “Doc’ Morales’ masculine aftershave, he laid his
head back on the edge of the couch and stared at the water stain on the ceiling. He thought about turning on the television
set but it’d be full of perky, smiling people arguing playfully with one another as they tried to haste the real world
out for its late morning commute. It was a little more than his nerves would allow at that moment.
He wondered idly what Betty would say about his getting a small dog now that he was ‘longer a cop’. Now
that he wanted one, half as much as fourteen year old Matthew did, but because it allowed him to consider the option of really
going through with his semi-annual threat to retire. What would it mean to him not to get up and drive to the Precinct, not
to have to watch the side streets for cunning punks who hoped to memorize what all the cops there looked like so they wouldn’t
keep getting busted for drug possession by the local cops? To sit down and watch the Fourth of July fireworks
at Tahoe with Wee Mattie and his mother Loraine?
“ Thanksgiving still meant the Baer’s house out front, for all of them were rookies
together at the Academy in L.A. in the late Fifties. Christmas was the upstairs apartment over the bar with James Patrick
and Amanda, who had less than two years to go till she graduated college and flew away on her own wings! Canadian Geese always
fly home. Would she know to fly back to them as often as two lonely old men would need her too? Even Herb
and Betty’s twins were in their last tear of college, having chose UCLA because they feared the bad rep as a school
for ‘radicals’ that was overshadowing the spacious, wind swept campus near here.
But the thought of twins brought him back to the one grain of granite under his partial: Loraine and Orin Devlon! Orin
fancied a likeliness between him and the pudgy Caesar who ruled Rome in the early years of Church History. Betty, a history
professor at Berkley, or Brother John, could have given him the exact dates, but as he rubbed the chilled, unopened bottle
of beer across his forehead, eyes closed, he couldn’t escape what he did know.
Orin had come in dressed in one of those white Plantation owner suits with the straw hat he was still affecting since
he still went out in the day time then, he hadn’t been bitten by the wild bat yet, and having unloaded another dozen
helium balloons and two impossible to keep alive containers of African Violets to the potting shed of hot house flowers already
overpowering the room he had intoned that men would sniff after ‘any tail, no matter how sick the mind behind it, just
as long as they could walk down the street and have their buddies see them walking with a good looking chick hanging on his
arm! ‘ Given the delicate balance of his own mental state depending on the nearness of the
full moon, that would have been laughable, except Loraine convinced herself that he had said it, not her unbalanced twin,
and she’d slammed the door in his face. Simply keeping her word about never keeping him from Wee Mattie.
At least she’d stayed true to that promise!
Try as hard as he might, no peace would come to him, though his eyes burned with the lack of sleep. Showering and deliberately
dressing for the causal three day week-end he had planned with his niece and son, which hopefully would include Loraine,
no matter how causally she lied in promise to keep her weekend dates when ‘family’ included him with him and the
boy, he drove toward the docks, still feeling protected behind the untrimmed beard he’d worn for the last three months.
Nothing had really happened, but the next time he asked for the loan of an officer for a stake-out he was confident his willing
to be ‘loaned’ would come in handy. If not for him, then for the man Police Commissioner John Martins replaced
him with. “Doc’ Morales would be the best guess. Herb was ready to retire and he made it known he wasn’t
going to accept any long term assignment that would hold him on Stanyon Street once Betty decided ‘enough is enough!’
“ Hi, Uncle Al! “ Amanda MacKendrie
called with genuine affection as the burly Scot walked into the bar’s dim interior, allowing his eyes to adjust to the
lights cast by the florescent beer signs. The diminutive nineteen year old looked so much like her mother in the half-light
of the empty room that it took his breath away for a moment, but he smiled evenly at her to show he’d heard. While she
finished putting the rest of her textbooks in her backpack, he reached out and shook hands with his older brother James Patrick,
their eyes speaking the love so many years of shared grief had built, though both had been foundlings when they were taken
in by Egan and Mary MacKendrie.
But
he reserved the bulk of his physical demonstrations for the pretty, dark haired girl as she shrugged into her book pack and
raced toward him across the sawdust-covered floor. The smells of the wharf disappeared almost magically as he breathed in
the coconut oil scent left over from her shampoo and shower in the apartment upstairs. Her mother’s Polynesian coloring
seemed highlighted as he pulled back, with her still in his arms, and really looked at her. The body of
the lonely sixteen year old girl he’d just view En Sutu at the house on pearl Avenue was still haunting
him behind his closed eyelids. And he looked at his vivacious and cheerful niece as if seeing her for the first time.
“
Lorrie and Wee Mattie are coming out wid us for the weekend. Do ye want tae come wid us, Sweetie? “
It seemed odd to him that he hadn’t asked her yet, he was so sure she’d come, the way she did anytime he
was able to bring fourteen year old Matthew along. He thought she might even demand to know if ‘we’ included her
widowed father so she could make a point of how she was still angry at him, but she only pursed her lips and brought up another
subject, that for him came ‘off the wall’ because he certainly wasn’t expecting it!
“ Why do you insist on doing that, Uncle Al? “ She
chided in tender regard. “ You know that Loraine despise being called “Lorrie”
as much as I do being called “Mandy” and Matthew is thirteen! The last thing he wants to be called is ‘little’
anything! As a guy I would have thought that you already figured that out! “
She gave a sigh of helpless resignation at the inability of adults to remember anything of importance if it came from
the mouth of someone younger than themselves! Like they’d been born knowing everything and only got more sure of it
as their arteries hardened with age! Forgetting that she was mad her Dad, she smiled brightly till his frown eased away, and
blowing a kiss to them both, she slid the bicycle out from behind the aged jukebox and struggled with the heavy door until
a patron came in, and held it open for her, smiling at her youth and innocence and dark good looks inherited from her grandfather.
James Patrick glared at the newcomer and took his time in walking over to take his order. Leaving the clean towel draped
over his left shoulder as a sure signal of his dislike. But the young man with thinning hair, a tourist, simply shrugged and
ordered a glass of house beer. Laying out three crumbled one dollars bills over a crisp new five.
Out of sheer orneriness, the giant Scotsman took the new bill and walked to the light cast through the front windows,
holding it up as if he were checking for the watermark to make sure it was legitimate. The stranger seemed annoyed, but hunching
his shoulders he simply placed his elbows on the satin finish of the antique Mahogany bar and cocooned himself with his own
thoughts, grateful for the rattle and hiss of the heater blowing down on his shoulder blades from the faded green box suspended
several feet below the high ceiling of the bar.
‘ Daddy makes his living getting people drunk!
‘
Amada had wailed to him after her
Dad refused to give up ownership in the quiet neighborhood pub after her mother had been hit and killed by a drunk driver
and she spent nearly six months in the hospital recovering from the spinal injuries that took away her hoped for career in
Women’s Soccer.
‘ What am I going to do a’ mae age?
Be a bouncer a’ somebody else’s bar, Al? ‘
James Patrick had asked from the depth of his own pain at his wife’s death and his daughter’s shattered
dreams. Expecting the younger man to act as a doorway they could both use, from different sides of the generation gap. Since
he had never been able to get Loraine to marry him and allow them to raise their son together, he welcomed the sense of family
that being a part of James Patrick and his teenaged daughter allow him. Perhaps they would have made up before this, it’d
been two years since the early evening traffic accident, but that would have forced him to take too close a look at his own
relation with Loraine Lovich and he feared he’d lose her entirely if he did that. And she was his one lifetime to purpose
and sanity, as insane as that sounded even to his own ears!
Though the stranger gave no sign of paying attention to their conversation as he nursed his beer, the two brothers
still walked to the far end of the bar and kept their voices low as they spoke.
“ I heard on the scanner. It’s one of the houses she owns, isn’t it?
“
Allen MacKendrie Hoag
tried to hide his pain and inner turmoil. To agree to the simple statement of fact, that yes it was one of the properties
Loraine received in her divorce settlement from ‘Snake’ Lovich was tantamount to saying he believed she was the
Blue Smiler Killer! And he couldn’t say that, not without proof! Even if he didn’t love her. But the weight of
circumstantial evidence was building the DA’s case against her, no matter how much he tried to find alternative scenarios.
Samuel ’The Snake’ Lovich might have been a part of this from the beginning to discredit her and take away
the Lad, but if that were true, that would be even more dangerous than worrying that Loraine was the one selecting
isolated people from the dying Haight Ashbury and using them as targets. That was more what her creepy twin Orin would do.
But one breath of that to anyone and she’d stop speaking to him for good, and take their son with her! With the wealth
at her disposal she could bury the teen boy where he’d never be able to see or reach him again, and he couldn’t
risk another loss like that!
“
Cheel in on this one? “
James Patrick seemed unable, or unwilling to keep the contempt out of his voice. Although the thin, nervous man paraded
himself as the stud of the precinct and was this year’s Super Cop nominee for the Mayor’s selection committee,
the burly ex-lumberjack made no attempt to hide his dislike for the man he considered secretly effeminate.
“ No. He has ’nae been in all week. “
“ That must be a blow to Ernie. Has ‘Lala’ taken the week off tae?
“
Al
winced. His brother knew he and Ursula Buchanan were ‘a number’ all last year before Norris Cheel decided he couldn’t
afford to allow the Scot to have any private pleasure in his life; but to protest would only earn him a bitter scowl from
his older brother who called a spade a spade-even to your face.
There was simply no pretense about the big Scot. You knew exactly where you stood with him, although he was polite
to any woman for ‘their Mary’s sake’, the gentle, retired school teacher who’d taken in a rowdy boy
everyone else thought incorrigible and taught him how to trust love. When the pretty little pregnant girl showed up in the
middle of a snow storm and stayed only long enough to give birth to a baby boy, he’d taken the tiny red bundle into
his arms and into his heart, and sometimes it felt as though the surly cop Al’d grown into was as much his own flesh
as his daughter Amanda.
“
I’m on my way in no fer the paperwork, then I’ll see McDowell on my way to the docks. You think you can
get out early? I can put out the Webber and we can throw back a few before Mattie und his mo’other get there?
“
“ Naw.
“ James Patrick rumbled deep in his chest. Pretending that he couldn’t find anyone
who’d be willing to take over the slow hours of the bar. He didn’t like Loraine Lovich since she married Al’s
rankest enemy and gave their son another man’s name, and more he saw her flourish under her own brand of ‘business’
he wasn’t sure how well he’d liked her when she was just hanging around his kid brother making redouble for him!
“ But call mae an’na’ how before you leave the morgue. It might be slow enough
tae simply close the place down fer the holiday. “
“ What holiday? “ Al asked, immediately
regretting it for a deep, wolfish grin took residence on his brother’s bearded lips and chin.
“ Thanks! “ The tourist called in false
cheer as he carefully picked up all of his money, even the silver change.
Not wanting to encourage him, the ex-lumberjack didn’t even glance in his direction and the chill winds that
quickly stole away the concentration of heat on the back of his shoulders seemed warm compared to the reception he’d
found from the locals in San Francisco thus far!
“ Mae birthday, Son. Do ye hae Alzheimer’s or ‘Sometimer’s?
“
Though he didn’t like to joke
in that macabre manner away from the Station House, Al Hoag indulged the burly man, wishing he could be more like him. Even
more like Norris Cheel. Inwardly he began to wonder if he was too ‘soft’ for Narco? If he was ‘too intellectual’
like Cheel and Chief of Detectives Ernie Buchanan claimed? But hadn’t James Patrick said it all when he said, ‘At
my age, what else am I going to do? ‘
The beer was warm, but it was wet. He slipped a dollar bill across the damp portion of the bar where James Patrick
had begun to wipe, acknowledging that they had to part company, even though he knew the man would only slip it into the glass
jar with the tips he kept, to help pay for Amada’s books and tuition at Berkeley.
It was a hellv’a way to make a living, poking into the private lives of people after they were dead, but it beat
doing the sly spying required in Narco. The fact that these young men and women, most from good families who didn’t
like ‘I don’t know’ for an answer as to why their child smiled themselves to death in the midst of a harmless
summer of rebellion, were even dead when the ‘Tox’ Screens showed nothing but elevated levels of the pleasure
endorphin in their brains was neither strictly ‘Cide nor strictly ‘Narco. But then, why should anything suddenly
get easy in his life that this late date?
Even
as the elevator doors opened and he stepped out into the sterile green hall way to the County Morgue, he was already planning
the three-day getaway with his woman and his son!
-
*
-
Doug McDowell’s
frown eased as soon as he saw the reason for the contaminated air reaching into the closed room.
“ Did you bring the coffee? “ He demanded gruffly,
turning the house on his hands before reaching out to shake with the burly Scot at the end of the metal tables.
“ It’s
on yer desk. “ Al promised.
“ Save you a lot of time and effort if you’d just tell me the combination of
beans that goes into it, Al! “ His voice deepened to hide his enjoyment
of the soft spoken man’s company. The room seemed emptier after the autopsy of a young person, even more so when a near-tern
fetus had to be sculpted from the dead girl’s womb.
“
Then what wud I hae tae bribe ye wid, Doug? “
“ A point well taken. “ The Medical Examiner agreed,
glad that his assistant had a dental appointment this morning.. Cleaning up had given him time to adjust his internal reaction
to the senseless death and find some measure of release in physical activity. The kind the patients under his scalp were no
longer capable of.
Looking around
to make sure the recording device was turned off and the safety lights would come on as soon as he turned off the overhead
lights, he grunted in satisfaction and pushed his way through the double doors toward his office. He knew the package of specialty
gourmet would be on the corner of his desk, just as the weary cop had promised, but it gave him an excuse to be alone with
his thoughts for a few minutes longer. The question was inevitable and it irked him that he couldn’t give a more definitive
answer after seven victims than he had been able too after the first apparently accidental overdose of an unknown drug!
They both knew that
few questions were asked by this latest wave of runaway teens who were trying to make the corrupted Community live up to everything
they’d heard about in grade school, everything they needed it to be. They just took whatever pill was offered to them
and waited for the ‘high’, whether they paid out their savings for it, or simply took it from the stoned, smiling
boy who watched them so expectedly. It was a far cry from the brief Social Experiment gone awry and the sooner it slipped
into folk lore and ancient history, the better for him. Drug overdoes, usually, had a boring sameness to them. Flesh dehydrated,
cells over-hydrated, a meaningless and violence cession of existence before any of them were even old enough to know what
it was like to live out from under their parent’s shadows.
“Zee’s going to take Chambers in the second round, just you wait and see! “
Al nodded. Zee Rowan was his ex-partner, as quick with his mouth as he was his fists, but the Commish liked him because
he could batter most of his opponents senseless before they could stop to wonder if the Precinct’s honor was worth the
beating? To bring him up now meant the sad faced man had found nothing new with the dead girl this morning than he had with
any of the others.
‘ Why beat a dead horse? ’ Al asked himself sadly, sipping
on the pungent coffee and pretending to watch a speck of dried fly turd move.
“ I’ll be on mae boat all week-end. Monday tae, if I can talk the Lass in’tae
it. Wee Mattie is here for the summer. “
“ Good for you! “ Doug agreed, warming his lips
over the steam rising from his mug. “ If it can’t wait, I’ll forward it to Park House
and it’ll be waiting for you, otherwise enjoy! Gawd knows you’ve earned it since the Fourth!
“
The first of seven victims had been
found laying face down on the grass in the Panhandle, a lengthy meridian just outside Golden Gate Park which fronted the low
rent Victorians where the white side of Hippie lived when it wasn’t summer or ‘cool’ to wander around outdoors
stoned. A few streets away was The Fillmore. The Black side of being Cool. And the local lore claimed ‘Spades
were programmed for Hate’, but most of the time they mingled peaceably under the banner of ‘Brotherhood’
and no one bothered to ask where they lived where they weren’t grooving side-by-side with the Locals.
‘ Peace, Man! Make love, not war! ‘ The local lore claimed that too.
Because so many thousands of people had gathered in the Park and along the beaches for the Fourth of July celebration,
there was never any expectation of finding the person responsible, it was filed away as another tragic overdose and the unlikely
fact that they showed no toxic levels of the drugs they injected routinely simply slipped between the cracks.
The parents were found and notified, they cried and claimed the body, blaming themselves as much as they did the police, and
it wasn’t until the third victim was found with no apparent reason for having smiled themselves to death that the quiet
precinct house on Stanyon Street woke to the fact that they had a serial killer working in an area where fewer and fewer of
the occupants knew each other, or cared.
The
centers opened for street kids to get back home were doing an overflow business, most with 48-hours, others got swept up at
the bus station by chicken hawks and turned on to drugs, then turned out for prostitution, boys and girls, until they were
too ashamed to call their parents and ask to come home. How do you go back to being somebody’s little girl or somebody’s
little boy when you’ve been forced to have sex with a two-hundred and fifty pound man with warts on his thing?
Al worked the streets to get as many of them home as he could, but the ones he couldn’t he busted, with a resigned
awareness that he couldn’t do for them what they were unwilling to do for themselves. Some banded into ‘families’
and survived by pooling the Welfare money the pregnant girls brought in; sharing mattresses, communal rooms,
needles and sad stories and venereal diseases, like the little girl who’d been found dead in the Commune on Pearl Street
owned and run by Loraine Devlon Lovich!
She
no longer lived there, she’d kicked out her ‘artist’ friends and rented out both floors to a fluid and ever-changing
Community so all chipped in for food and drugs and rent money at the end of the month, but stuck in his gut that she had allowed
this to continue when she knew what was happening, but she had nothing but vile and derogatory words for Weak Willie
her father, because he ‘profited from other people’s pain’. Because he loved her as the mother of his son,
he wanted her to be better, purer, the imagine of the girl he had thought her to be that long ago summer in Capitola, near
Santa Cruz. But he wasn’t that man either, that he’d been fourteen years ago, and so he bore this pain with the
same stoicism that saw him through the tragedy of his young wife’s death in the arms of his best friend, and Mary MacKendrie’s
death from the rapid dog he tried to coax to stay with them, being too young to understand its ‘wildness’ was
sickness insured, and not the feral attitudes he took for granted in the other wild animals in that isolated forest of Saskatchewan!
“
Is Lorrie and Matthew coming along with you? “
“ Wild horses couldn’t keep them away. “ He
answered proudly, with a shrug. Hiding the scars and the rest of his lower face with his coffee mug, knowing he was too expressive
of how deeply he felt toward the strong willed and independent woman. “ Aye, un
James Patrick’s wee lassie, Amanda. “
The balding man’s
sigh caught Al’s attention.
“
That girl makes me wish I was thirty years younger! And in her league. “
Too late he caught the smoldering look of resentment in his seated companion’s eyes and he pushed himself to
his feet with a struggle. The long hours of cold and standing in one place where taking their toll on him, ageing him faster
the way the same housefly ages in three days in winter, to three weeks of life in the summer.
“ Maybe if we got married, you’d finally give me the ratio and bean mixture you use
for this. It’s delicious, Al! “
“ Don’t count on it. “ Was the gruff reply.
As he walked back into the hall, which had been illuminated by the uniformed janitor who was mobbing up a bloody trail
from the service elevator, Al found himself having to look away, preoccupied with his own inner wrestlings. The man’s
smock had a first name on it, but he didn’t even bother to look the way he did when he was working undercover in the
Haight Ashbury. Frankly, it was one time he didn’t even want to know
He’d left his letter of resignation on Ernie’s desk, as he had a hundred times before in the last nine
years, but a hollowness inside him warned that with Wee Mattie reaching such an impressionable age, the best work he could
do was to be available to his son as the boy needed him!
The
drive to Vallejo Street was easier than he expected. His renting the Mother-in-law cottage behind Herb and Betty Baer’s
house had been meant to be transitory, a chance to look around and find another nice small apartment for him and the Lad since
the off-ramp for the Army Street by-pass dislodged a huge chunk of San Francisco’s less than stellar past as well as
an intimate Community who lived on that hill for many generations, talking over tiered clotheslines in sight of the bust,
modern freeway with a false sense of history and neighborhood to bond them as solid as barnacles to an abandoned pier, but
the City Fathers and the needs of the City by the Bay took precedence. Now that the Baer Twins had opted for UCLA in Southern
California, for fear of the reputation US Berkeley was gaining as a breeding ground for rebellion and uncivil Radical movements
of every type and description, the need for him to move out of the hidden two-bedroom bungalow had ceased, and he found himself
becoming more comfortable with taking his shoes off in Betty’s upstairs living room than he ever had in his old bachelor
apartment [in every sense of that word].
Gathering everything he needed, he took a moment to knock on Herb’s workshop on the way out, but the padlock
on the outside told him what he was too stubborn to admit since he really needed the chance to talk with The Deacon before
he came face to face with his son. Since he couldn’t change anything, he accepted it with a shrug. Simply making sure
his parked car left Betty enough room to get to the washer and dyer set since he was uncomfortable giving anyone the keys
to the little red Mustang.
His mood improved greatly when the cab showed within ten minutes of its estimated time of arrival and the burly man
driving it only raised an eyebrow at the box of groceries and the cooler filled with ice chips that Al had purchased on the
way home since he would be without wheels all weekend. The man insisted the ‘stuff’ ride in the trunk’ and
Al slipped him an extra five as he paid his fare. As soon as he turned the key in the lock of the mesh gate barring unauthorized
passage to the exclusive marina slips, the world slipped off his shoulders, and even though the weight of the groceries added
to the sloshing burden of the melting ice chips put a strain on his back and thighs, it was so worth it to know he’d
have everything ready by the time Loraine and Wee Mattie showed up! He wanted so badly to impress her, and despite the fact
that he was old enough to be her father, she always managed to make him feel like an awkward and giddy teen when he was around
her.
The tide mixed with the cast
offs from the busy public wharf to fill the air at the marina and especially the closed in cabin of the diminutive wind ship
with an almost claustrophobic fish stench. Propping open both small portholes, fore and aft, the sturdy Scot drew out the
process of cleaning and wiping the down the miniature oven, hoping the coarse fumes of the chemical spray could offset the
thin layer of brown grit and flotsam that he’d seen along the water line of the prized craft. It was annoying to know
that as solid as The Mary Maiden felt underfoot, the Sea was forever gnawing on her; slowly exposing her vulnerability;
diminishing her centimeter by centimeter in its relentless hunger. Trying to shake off the somber mood of this morning’s
grisly discovery at the Pearl Street Commune, Al deliberately left his ID and badge in the top drawer of the forward bunk
and loosened the top two buttons of his floridly Hawaiian ALOHA shirt, determined to be just ‘Dad” or “Big
Al’ for all three days of their extended week-end together!
His first warning that his son had already come on board was the clang of the bright re kettle lid on the Webber
free standing bar-b-que; then the sound of discrete male voices put him on his guard and he approached the open air hatch
at the top of the companionway cautiously, debating as to whether he should return for his gun or not? Then he recognized
the higher pitched one as his fourteen-year-old son’s voice and he resolved not to take away the excited sound of joy
from the youth’s tone by betraying the level of paranoia he endured with his grandfather and great-grandfather.
‘ Loraine! ‘
His heart beat quicker at the intrusive insight. With both kids on board they’d have to be
careful in their intimacy toward one another during the day but he could already feel the pull of the moonlight with The Merry Maiden anchored near the Ferrallon Islands in deep seas; though it was
only five thirty, in late afternoon sunlight. There was so much he had to say to the Lass now that he’d decided to make
his resignation final. Twenty=two years as a cop was enough! He was young enough to make up for the mistakes they’d
shared on the past and have a brother or sister to raise with Wee Mattie! It would never be Ozzie and Harriet like his favorite
television show when he and Nora Sue were beginning their lives together in the Fifties, but times change. People change.
At the thought of his wife, he winced and turned his head aside just as a fast moving shadow struck him at chest level.
“ Daddy!
Daddy! Da! “ Matthew Lovich shouted, throwing his arms
as far around the man’s barrel chest as he could reach, momentarily forgetting the cool distain his friends at School
demanded for him to be allowed to hang out at the edges of their sphere of interest.
His school backpack, still attached by one shoulder struck the edge of the cabin with a solid thumb and he braced for
the rebuke, but it never came. Instead his father bent a little lower and tightened his own arms around the awkward youth,
sharing whispered words of greeting and reassurance. The tension slowly began to drain out of the stooped youth and Todd Spears
his body guard saw the immediate change on the boy’s face and voice, making a mental note of this unusual relationship
when he’d unconsciously accepted his employer’s version at face value. But it also meant the willful boy would
be less willing to implicitly obey commands, even those meant to save his life, so he would have to be a little sharper in
watching their surroundings. But for the boy’s sake it was a warming experience, and he found some of the tenseness
draining out of his own face and body language as he shook hands with the stock, bearded man, taking note of the show of strength,
the handshake that seemed genuinely warm, the ugly scars covered by the beard that implied the hellish past Loraine Lovich
had filled in him on. He couldn’t imagine what it must be like to be held back while you watched your best friend and
your wife burn to death in front of you, and then have the man who saved you life keep alive the ugly smears to every new
generation of Blue Suit passing through the small precinct house after graduation from the Police Academy! Human beings are
a mass of contradictions even before you throw in the kinks of reaction due to personal tragedies. All things being equal,
he liked the trusted the man despite the sleek woman’s appraisal!
Stepping back into the shadows he noted the empty berth beside them which at least made it more difficult to simply
step on the boat from anywhere on the side, but the nearness of the canvas covered fifty-six footer towering over them on
the right made him intensely uncomfortable. Even having a strange crew moving about was less of a danger than an unattended
craft where stealthy approach was almost undetectable. The sooner the other member of their party arrived the better he’d
like it! Once they were in deep water he could drop the sonar probes that would identify anything, even the size of a shark,
as it approached underwater!
“
When do we eat? “ The stocky youth demanded happily, shrugging out of the
final restrain of his book pack unto the pack of charcoal briquettes Al hadn’t had time to put into the waiting metal
beast and light. No one at Weak Willie’s house would let him near matches or flames because they feared his excitement
when he saw the flames leap into life, consuming with the energy denied his own angers.
Al temporized as he answered, seeing the young woman with chestnut hair weaving her way confidently through the tourists
on the other side of the high steel tension fence. Even as this distance she looked and acted so much like Susan MacKendrie
that it took his breath away. Although she had her own key in her black book pack, she simply grapped the edge of the gate
as the occupants walked out, and because they recognized the cut of her clothes and the expense of the mountain touring bike
that she handled with careless ease they simply smiled and reminded her to let it lock behind her before she left the area.
Petty thefts from the expensive boats still continued but most of it was pilfering from newly hired servants who weren’t
yet jaded by the cost of the things left scattered around so carelessly by their true owners.
Loraine might prefer having dinner at one of the exclusive Fisherman’s Wharf restaurants where years before they’d
gone barefoot and sandy with their love clasp between their fingers despite the difference in their ages which had only made
him seem more attractive to her as teenager. She was as mercurial and restless these last nine months that it was impossible
for him to firm up any plans well in advance. He’d even taken to watching her waist line in the constant photos in the
Society pages, both with and without her husband, for she knew of her drive to have another child when ‘Snake’
Lovich had done the world a favor long years ago and got himself fixed! Watching Amada walk beside her
massive bicycle as she attempted to catch her breath, it suddenly made the burly Scot feel every year of his age. It was as
if he was watching Lorain, then Loraine Devlon, and he alone had aged over the intervening fourteen years!
He startled violently at the boy’s pull on his fingertips.
“ She’s not coming, Da. “ Matthew said softly, lowering his
head so no one else could overhear. His retreat into the childish appellation moved the burly Scot as intended and he took
a firm hold on his anger for the shy boy’s sake.
“
Alright, son. “ He was shocked at the calm he heard in his own voice.
Turning slightly, but careful to keep a hold; of the boy’s hand as long as the fingers pressed against the ridges of
his own flesh, he informed the tight faced young man the approaching girl was part of their group, and to expect two men and
a young girl his son’s age before they cast off.
Todd
Spears nodded, grateful for the older cop’s professional courtesy. Then he moved to the front of the boat, watching
the sleek, hung-over looking ship bowing on the increasing tide to their left. He didn’t dare go onboard and reassure
himself because there were sure to be alarms set on the sleepy-appearing craft, otherwise there would be people on board twenty-four,
seven; no one owns a yacht of that size and expense and then ‘forgets’ about it, even if they were as rich as
the Shah of Iran! Despite his keen interest in protecting the shy boy assigned to his care, Todd took a few minutes of male
fantasy enjoying the push and skim of the young woman’s blouse as the straps holding on her University backpack pulled
the pink knit cloth taunt across the high, clean breasts, her hair shimmering in highlights of natural cleanliness and a modest
perm. but by the time she noticed his quiet presence on the deck of the wind ship he was fully under control of his emotions
again. Well, nearly so. He had to flick himself painfully with his thumb and forefinger before he dared to follow along the
cooler shadows of the pier side expanse of the trim craft as she approached the man and boy working on starting the bar-b-que
together.
“
Permission to come aboard, Cappy! “ She called happily, a little
out of breath.
Old Ned reacted and Todd had to busy
himself inside the canopied steering and navigation section of the boat, also checking on the type and amount of emergence
equipment stored on board as long as he was bent in half anyhow.
Matthew raced up to his cousin’s attempts to raise the front wheel of the knobby wheeled bike over the railing,
lifting the entire bike over his head as easily as someone else might have tossed a pillow aside in a pillow fight. It pleased
him to see the admiration on his older cousin’s face because any displays of physical prowess usually impressed males
only. Young males his own age mostly, and his new wrestling coach; ‘maybe’, he added with a cautious mental note. It was next to impossible to impress adults!
The fact that she wouldn’t have to pull out her
bike and make coy, if sophisticated comments about the traffic crisis getting to the campus, by way of explaining why her
Dad wouldn’t let her buy a car yet, wasn’t lost on Amanda as her eyes sparkled with her Uncle’s brusque
attempts to help her on with a light coat she’d left onboard on her last visit. She half-hoped the tall, lanky Marine
with the Beretta strapped to his side would offer to help her, so she could ‘accidentally’ touch one of
his hands the way she was learning to flirt with the boy on campus, but he was all business again, and he kept the boy shielded
behind him and Uncle Al like a sandwich!
“
Hi, Mattie! “
“
Hi, Mandy! “ He answered, a little breathless as he lowered the massive
frame and tread to the slick surface. They’d made a pact last summer that it was alright for each of them to use childhood
names because they both respected the other’s need for grow to mature, while the adults around them did it out of disrespect.
‘Huge difference!’ He thought with a smile as Amada pushed her lips against
him and he could feel their warmth and softness, even the taste of her sweat, as compared to the rigid lipped press of Ritchie
Rinehart’s little sister, whom he’d been forced to permit if he wanted to continue to hang out with ‘The
Gang’ as they liked to call themselves.
He
ached to tell Amada about the odd, yet vaguely disturbing episode last month, but they’d have to wait until they were
anchored somewhere, because if word of it ever got back to his mother she’d feel that an ‘all boy’s school’
was strict enough and she’d allow Father to send him to that Military Academy he’d been threatening since the
day he found him in his locked bedroom! He didn’t want to risk that. They wouldn’t let him have as much contact
with his biological father as this school did, so he had to be far more cunning and circumspect than he’d ever been
before.
Todd
Spears was cool, and after reading the graphic private investigator’s report on what happen to the rich man’s
son that wasn’t allowed to be printed in the newspaper accounts or displayed on the television, he understood uniquely
why he couldn’t afford to ‘play games’ with the Security man the way this boy foolishly had! But it had
also stripped something from his innocence that he couldn’t talk to his mother or Father about, and he hoped that if
Mother and Uncle Orin didn’t come along on this outing after all, he’d have the time to share the growing questions
in his head with his Dad. It seemed as if every passing month since his twelfth birthday some ugly new reality had thrust
itself in front of him in challenge of the happiness and carefree life he’d lived on Chou Lin’s massive estate
in Burlingame, and more than once he wished himself back there!
If the quiet and unassuming Chinese poet was really a godfather of crime in Hong Kong and here in Chinatown,
what did that have to do with him, or Mom for that matter? He liked them and cared for them, wasn’t that enough? ‘Why
did Life have to get more complicated just because you were older and had more access to brain cells, he mourned inwardly,
unable to find any more satisfying an answer this time, then the thousand other times he’d raised the question in his
mind!’
“
What smells so good, Uncle Al? “ Amada teased, but she was tensing up inside
as the tall, thin ex-marine stepped out to the pitching deck of the moored wind ship.
Al glanced from her staring and open-mouthed enjoyment of the bodyguard to the struggle the lean man was having in
keeping his own admiration in check. ‘ It would only get worse once he got to know her’, He thought in amiable
pride, for Amada was every bit her mother and father’s child! ‘What sort of man was Todd Spears,
was the question now!’
“
None that’s for our dinner now, Lass. It will have to be the dinner for Skipper Hal and his mates when they come
aboard. Wee Mattie j’ust told me Loraine isn’t meeting us. “
“ Daddy! “ The fourteen-year-old groaned, his
attempts at maturity forever and always ruined by his Dad’s inability to recognize he was growing too old for a public
use of that childish name! “ She isn’t coming at all. She and Uncle Orin left for Singapore
this morning on the Lear. “
Todd Speaks straightened
intuitively at the sudden alteration of the relaxed, friendly man ahead of the boy. Even the young woman he’d been admiring
saw and reacted to the stiffness in the Scot’s body posture, the coldness that swept his eyes from gray to steel, and
hardened his smile into a grimace.
“
She can’t do that. “ He warned.
“ She did, Dada. You aren’t going to be made, are you? “
No matter how hard he fought, tears trembled at his lower lashes and threatened to emasculate him by their heated betrayal.
Al Hoag knelt at his sons feet abruptly, as one
might to a king.
“ It’s
sharp news that I did’na expect tae hear. It put’s yer mo’other in a bad light son, I can no deny that.
But if ye’ll bear wid mae for a minute o’ tae, I promise to take better care o’ mae emotions. I know that’s
something yer grandfather and Poppo Devlon are strict about, und I don’t want to make it an’na harder for ye in
their house than it already is. “
Matthew
threw his arms around his father’s neck, pressing as close to him as their clothing would allow, and he didn’t
feel safe until his Dad’s arms reached around him in a painful grip.
“ Why can’t I live with you? “
“ Because “Snake’ Lovich won’t allow it, son. There are some things
in life we must accept. We’ve talk a’ boot this before, haven’t we? “
The boy nodded, his tears wetting his dad’s brightly colored shirt.
The boy promised grimly, but Al pulled him back until they could look at one another face-to-face. When he’d
been the lost and hurting boy hating the father he knew only from his unknown mother’s sobs during labor, it was Egan
MacKendrie, the retired Mounty, who’d gotten down on one knee and made him look at him, face to face, as he did now,
and strike the branding iron hot that would forever claim the hurting soul on the side of right and justice. But as the boy
blinked, he couldn’t be sure he’d done as well as the man whose love had raised him to such a stern moral code.
He could only hope! The boy was only fourteen! There was still time to shape and mold him by love. He’d been younger
by two years when Egan had been forced to end his wife’s dying misery with a shot to the head and then his own with
the last shell. It had taught the twice-abandoned boy something about the iron grip of Truth
and Reality, but this boy was indulged and deliberately over-gratified by three different generations, each for their own
purpose. Would he accept the iron rule as easily? Or at all?
“ Matthew. Do you love me? “
“ You know I do, Dada. “
“ Do ye believe that I love you and you’re mother, und that I’d never deliberately
do something simply tae harm ye? “
It
took the young boy a little longer to answer.
“
Yes! “ He decided.
“ A young woman was found dead in a house that yer mo’other runs. She had no’
thing tae do wid it, but her leaving so suddenly before the Authorities can speak to her looks like unlawful flight to avoid
prosecution. “
“ Should
you be saying like that to the boy, Uncle Al? “
Al raised himself to his feet with his son’s help.
“ Its okay, Mandy. “ Matthew Lovich assured her
quickly. “ I can handle things I know, better than I can well intended lies or
outright omissions. “
It
was the voice of an adult, obviously meant to reassure her and not him.
‘ Whose forty-eighth birthday is it an’na way? ‘ The Scotsman asked himself unhappily,
for her sensed that his son’s childhood had just been stripped away by him, more than what the Press might say about
his mother’s involvement with the serial killer’s choice of victims in the Haight Ashbury! And yet he could see
no way around it.
He was profoundly grateful
for his niece’s presence because she allowed the boy to take up the interrupted game they’d been playing but he
bristled inwardly at the unspoken contempt of the hired guard. There were too many aspects of the boy’s short life he
didn’t know about, and this was neither the time nor the place to enlighten him!
He tried to find something necessary to do with his hands and choose the heating metal kettle of lighted coals because
it allowed him to turn his back on the other and still feel that Wee Mattie was perfectly safe. It wasn’t as if he’d
spoken to the Lass and told her ‘not to leave town’ after the fifth victim last week. Another death so soon was
a frightening aberration of the pattern the Killer had maintained since the start of the third summer for the Haight. He was
either about to embark on a murderous rampage at random, or stop, before he could be found! Either was terrifying real!
Al made a mental note to check with Interpol on Monday. Perhaps he’d been a day too early and a dollar
short in laying his resignation papers on Ernie Buchanan’s desk before he left work yesterday!
“ There’s beer on ice in the cooler. “ He
teased, thinking the shadow striking against him was his niece Amada, but it was the stern faced ex-Marine.
“ Locked-up downstairs, why? “
“ It’s too quiet. “
“ This is a private marina? “ Al suggested,
respecting the man’s gut instincts. He and Preacher had gotten through the war in Korea because of that invisible pull
on the spider’s web when something large is planned and the Cosmos becomes aware of it.
“ Naw. “ The man answered, reaching down
to pull out a chilled, brown bottle he only pretended to open, using his casual, head upraised pose to search a one-eighty
on the people and bicycles leaned up against the fence separating the tourists from the ship owners.
“ This hulk is registered to the Devlon corporation, isn’t it? “
“ Aye. “
The Scots man answered, filling the younger man’s free hand with the wood tipped fork he’d been using to
turn the briquettes on their side so the bottom could ignite as well. Then he strode to the companionway and disappeared down
it without a word to either of the teens playing Gin Rummy on the shifting deck.
When he returned his shirt was buttoned and his face was as hard as the lump under his shoulder from the holder and
gun. Suddenly this wasn’t a relaxed day in the sun for him any longer, though no greater danger loomed than the rise
and fall of the Herring Gulls and the disgusting little missiles they dispatched from time to time on the unlucky or the unwary
who sat without umbrellas.
-
-
End Chapter 1
