novelxo Half Moon Bay: Chapter 18
Flo Sibley called to let me know the bear was a bust, forensically.
“But it’s not all bad news.”
“Hit me.”
“Last year they earmarked a chunk of money to cover overtime during the demolition. Too much, as it turned out. There’s some cash sitting around. Whatever we don’t spend by the end of the fiscal year goes back into the pool. Use it or lose it. My captain, he’s a guy, likes gadgets. I went to him: ‘Don’t you think we could use a new camera? If I set it up to watch the pit, that makes it a park-related expense.’ ”
“Genius.”
“Yes and no. Because we’re supposed to be treading water. He can’t have it look like we’re being overly aggressive. He agreed, but there’s strings. First is we get it for no more than a month. For three hours a day.”
I could only laugh at such pristine bureaucratic logic.
“On the other hand,” Sibley said, “we are talking a brand-new camera. Tom’s real excited.”
“He’s our cameraman?”
“Another string.”
“What’s that going to achieve, three hours a day? We can’t schedule when the mother’s going to come back.”
“We don’t know if she’s going to come back. This is a shot in the dark at best. Be grateful. Originally it was two weeks. I had to negotiate him up.”
“What happens after a month?”
“I’m not going to worry about that now. So what’d the Dormer boys have to say?”
I described my visit to the homestead.
“Good grief,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, fine.”
“So Kelly has some kind of soul.”
“Maybe,” I said. “I’ll be shocked if he comes through with the money. I’ll wait awhile, but sooner or later I’m going to have to cremate. I did hear from Tipton, the CO at San Quentin. I emailed him a photo of the bear and asked him to show it to Fritz.”
“And?”
“What do you think? He’s never seen it in his life.”
“Right. Well, maybe the video will work out.”
“You’re an optimist, Florence Sibley.”
“A girl can dream,” she said.
—
I’M NOT AN optimist. Would you be, after you’ve carried the body of a man stabbed in the groin for bringing his girlfriend a box of Valentine’s Day chocolates, because what was he trying to say? Huh? That she was fat?
She didn’t mean to kill him. Just teach him a lesson in sensitivity.
His bad luck she hit the femoral artery.
Nor am I a pessimist. I’ve also seen neighbors rally to pay funeral costs for a man found in a tent on the side of the Claremont Avenue off-ramp.
My sister-in-law Andrea would say that I try to accept things as they are, dispassionately.
While I hoped Mary Franchette’s name would yield a wealth of new information, I expected little. And got less.
No death certificate. No obituary.
No news item in the Gazette or any of the local papers.
The Mary Franchettes who popped up on family tree sites or Find A Grave were the wrong age, either too young or having died in the 1890s.
I wrote to Nate Schickman and asked him to search again, then called Peter Franchette to provide a status report. I could confirm his sister’s existence at a reasonable level of confidence, and I felt I had to give him advance notice, on the off chance that Norman tried to contact him.
He was in Aspen, at a thought leadership conference. I caught him between sessions and laid it out: Helen, his half siblings, the baby.
“I’m not sure how I’m supposed to react,” he said.
“I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way.”
“I mean, everything’s changed. And nothing has.”
“I understand.”
In the background came the swift chatter of bright young people.
“About the affair,” he said. “I can’t say I’m surprised.”
“You knew already.”
“On some level, yes, I think so. Obviously they weren’t going to tell me outright. It’s a lot harder for me to understand why they would’ve hidden the baby. Unless it’s like you said, it was too painful for them to talk about. I’m trying to see the situation through my mom’s eyes. I feel like I ought to have a clearer picture of her, based on what you’ve told me. But it’s fuzzy. I grieved for her, and I was grieving for a completely different person.”
He paused. “I’m sorry for rambling. I’m having to rethink a lot of things. It’s like you showed me a color I’ve never seen before. So you don’t know where she is. Mary.”
“Not yet. I’ll keep looking. Having her name helps.”
“It’s not what I would’ve predicted. It’s so…biblical.”
“They named you Peter.”
“Mm. I never thought of it like that, but…And you said Claudia had children?”
“Two. One grandchild.”
“I’d like to know more about her.”
“You can try reaching out to them.”
“Would you do it?”
Not challenging. Scared to make the approach.
“Sure,” I said.
“Thank you.”
“No guarantees they’ll respond.”
“Of course. Thank you, Clay. You’ve already done far more than I could ask for. What about Norman? Frankly he sounds a little unstable.”
“He’s a bit of an odd duck.”
“He’s the only one left, though.”
“I’m not saying you shouldn’t meet with him,” I said. “But I’m still not certain what his role is in all of this.”
“You think you can find out more?”
“Hard to say. I have a few irons left in the fire. Unless you want me to stop.”
“Say I did,” he said. “Would you?”
Before I could answer, he said, “Keep going.”
—
CLAUDIA ALDRICH’S WIDOWER, Darren, was a pediatrician on staff at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. His daughters appeared to have left the city, Hannah settling in Los Angeles, Alexis in New York. I worked up the best email addresses I could find for each of them and sent notes off into the ether, keeping in mind that they were recently bereaved.
It’s a position I find myself in often: having to intrude upon a family’s pain and ask personal questions about their loved one. You can easily become a proxy for the indifference of the world.
On the other hand, grief does sometimes give rise to radical honesty, and a stranger’s exactly who you need. Spouses and children have volunteered unimaginably intimate details simply because I happened to be standing nearby. There’s no way to predict how an individual will react.
When no response was forthcoming from Darren Aldrich or his daughters, I let it lie.
Then a different iron came out of the fire.
Captain Jason Oblischer called me. “Yo, sorry to bother you.”
Firefighters.
“No bother at all. What’s up, man?”
“I felt pretty lame I couldn’t help you out. I started thinking about it some more, and it occurred to me, from when I was on active duty, we had these old logbooks. What these things are, they’re basically a summary of the day’s events, separate from the incident reports. Sort of like a backup copy, but they’re handwritten, in these great big old albums. We don’t keep em anymore, cause now everything’s computerized. I always liked reading em. Little snapshot of history, you know? That address you gave me, Engine Seven’s the current response district, but they didn’t open till 2000. It used to be Engine Four, down on Marin. I called them and the captain’s like, ‘Yeah, we got em. Tell him to come on by.’ ”
“Amazing. Thanks so much.”
“Don’t get too excited,” Oblischer said. “The logs are pretty bare bones compared with a full report. At most you’re gonna get a paragraph or two. But at least you’d be able to know if the station responded to the address on that date.”
“I’ll take it. I really appreciate it, Jason.”
“Of course. Totally my pleasure.”
—
I WAS AWARE of Fire Station Four as a circular, UFO-like structure planted in the triangle of land created by the intersection of three streets. The house Amy grew up in and where her parents still live is a few blocks away. I shared a cup of coffee with my mother-in-law, left Charlotte with her, and walked over.
I’d called ahead, but the nature of the job was such that I couldn’t schedule an appointment. I arrived at the station to find it unstaffed save a statuesque African American woman with a Grace Jones flattop.
Introducing herself as Lieutenant Beadle, she led me to the lounge.
The logbooks took up a whole cabinet, tucked behind the foosball table. They were as Oblischer had described: tall leather-bound tomes with cracked spines and flaking gilt trim. The final one was from 1977. Beadle tugged out 1970, and we sat on a swaybacked couch.
Each entry began with roll call, followed by a cryptic string of abbreviations and numbers. The color of the ink would switch from blue to black without warning, suggesting that the writer had been interrupted midsentence and returned hours later to find his pen gone. Which, I supposed, was what happened at a firehouse.
Beadle paged to Friday, March 13.
“Let’s see if I can decode some of this for you,” she said. “That day, Lieutenant Davidson is on the engine. Boyle’s the Engineer. He drives and runs the pump panel. Budenholz, O’Meara, and Vietri are your Hos, which is short for ‘Hoseman,’ neither of which is a term we use anymore, for obvious reasons.”
I laughed.
She pointed and continued. “Singleton, he’s your captain on the truck, and these other guys are Hosemen, too. ‘Watch’ means who’s monitoring the tape. The way it used to work, before cellphones, every corner had a pull box.”
“I’ve seen those.”
“Yeah, there’s a few left. San Francisco still uses them as a fail-safe. You see smoke, you run to a box and pull the handle, it sends a signal to the nearest stations. There’s a ticker-tape machine that spits out the box number. Somebody has to sit there round the clock, watching the tape. The new guy, probably, cause he gets the shit duties.”
“That’s what these are. Box numbers and call times.”
“Right. The old-timers knew the location of every box. They could look at the tape and be like, ‘Box Two Ninety-Six, that’s Shattuck and University,’ or whatever. Usually it’s nothing: A kid pulled the handle for fun. When that happens, they just record the box and the time.”
She flipped the page. “You said Vista Linda?”
At ten nineteen p.m., Box 1392 came over the tape.
Engine and truck dispatched two minutes later to 1028 Vista Linda Way.
While more elaborate than the preceding entries, the description of the job was clipped, almost curt. Beadle walked me through.
Total job time, from tone out to return, four hours. One-story residential, fifty percent involved. Four hundred feet of two-and-three-quarter-inch hose and a hundred feet of one-and-a-half-inch.
Practically the entire station had responded, hook-and-ladder, truck, hose wagon. Structure fire in the hills, adjacent to Tilden Park; would’ve been a big deal, she said.
I pictured the tortuous street, wooden houses shouldering together.
Nowhere did Gene, Beverly, or Mary Franchette appear, except by omission.
The person making the entry had noted no casualties.
Penciled in the margin, dashed off in a different hand:
Hopewell FBI 451-9782
“Is that what I think it is?” I asked.
“Hunh. Must be.”
“It couldn’t stand for something else.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. ‘Fuel based ignition.’ ‘Fresh brewed iced tea.’ ”
Beadle smiled. “Not to my knowledge.”
Norman Franchette had griped: They were hounding the shit out of me.
The cops?
He hadn’t answered directly.
Love of God, how many times do I have to say it? It wasn’t me.
I said, “That can’t be typical, for the Feds to get involved.”
“In eighteen years I’ve never seen it.”
“Only thing I can think of is the homeowner worked at Lawrence Berkeley. It’s a national lab.”
“Fine, but this is his residence. Why are they showing up?”
I said, “I’ll ask them.”
—
BOTH THE FBI resident agency in Oakland and the main field office in San Francisco put me off. They didn’t have or wouldn’t give me information on an agent named Hopewell. When it came to accessing files, I heard a familiar line: 1991 onward had been digitized; anything older would’ve been destroyed or off-loaded to Washington, DC.
The most straightforward way to find out, I was told, was to submit a Freedom of Information Act request, which I did.
Straightforward, but not quick. I got an email acknowledging receipt and promising a response—not necessarily an approval—within thirty business days.
Knowing that our bomb squad ran joint exercises with the FBI, I called a colleague there. He linked me to an agent named Tracy Golden, who offered to order the files on my behalf, with the caveat that she might not do much better than the general FOIA process.
“Maybe I’ll get them a little sooner, cause they won’t have to redact.” A fretful beat; then she hedged: “Honestly, I’m not sure what the requirements are for giving them to you.”
“I don’t want to make problems for you.”
“Let me think it over.”
“What about this person, Hopewell? You ever cross paths? If he’s alive he’s probably in his eighties by now.”
“Sorry, no. There’s a group, AFIO, the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. Someone might know him there. I can try their listserv, if you’d like. Now that I think about it—yeah, that’s definitely your best bet.”
Overselling to make up for reneging.
I thanked her and waited.
—
ON MARCH 29, Judge Sharon Feeley of the Alameda County Superior Court denied UC’s bid to lift the injunction banning construction at People’s Park. In the suit against the university, she designated as lead plaintiff the Defenders of the Park, whose application for tax-exempt 501(c)(3) status was pending, and whose financial infrastructure consisted of a GoFundMe page and a card table set up on Telegraph Avenue with a sawn-off watercooler bottle into which sympathetic pedestrians occasionally dumped loose change.
The next day, the Defenders announced that a San Francisco law firm had agreed to represent them pro bono. Money donated up to now would be redirected toward other projects raising awareness about the issue of appropriation of Native lands.
With the reconstruction of the park vegetable garden nearing completion, volunteers began readying the beds for warm-weather planting.
Berkeley PD didn’t have so many officers that they could devote resources to what increasingly seemed a stalemate. Quietly they began drawing down their presence at the park, reducing it to a single uniform stationed at Dwight and Bowditch.
On March 31, Amy took Charlotte for her six-month checkup, where the pediatrician declared her “ninety-ninth percentile for cute.”
On April 1, a young woman named Veronique Lujan stepped off a thirty-hour, three-stop flight from visiting her grandma in Guam. She got in a rideshare and texted a friend to meet her at the NewPark Mall Starbucks. She needed to get back on California time. Plus she was hella hungry. She hadn’t eaten anything on the plane, she said, and airport food was so nasty. She ordered a latte and a maple scone and excused herself to pee, leaving the friend to pick up their coffees. Fifteen minutes later Veronique had yet to reemerge, and the line for the bathroom stretched past the milk and sugar station. People groused about April Fools’. Knocking brought no response; nor did the friend’s frantic texts. The manager unlocked the door to find Veronique Lujan dead on the smeary tiles.
The friend wept as she spoke to me. Yes, Veronique had seemed groggy. But wasn’t that normal, after such a long trip? But she should have known better; she should have known something was wrong.
Autopsy would reveal the cause of death as respiratory failure, caused by hypoglycemic shock, followed by diabetic seizure.
Veronique Lujan was twenty-five.
Jurow and I loaded her onto the gurney van, drove her back to the morgue, and did the intake. While he began looking for her parents, I checked a missed call.
Deputy Edison: Ross Spitz responding to your question on the AFIO list. I worked for Buddy Hopewell at the Bureau. Feel free to give me a ring.
I reached Spitz at his home in Eugene, Oregon, where he’d settled after leaving the FBI. At present he ran a one-man security consulting firm.
“Mostly I fish,” he said.
He spoke warmly of Hopewell, under whom he’d spent a couple of years as a junior agent in San Francisco during the 1980s.
I said, “You must’ve been close, to keep in touch this long.”
“He was a mentor to me,” Spitz said. “I was fresh out of law school, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.”
“You’re not familiar with the name Franchette, or the fire.”
“Unfortunately not. Before my time. When you start out they throw a variety of things at you, so you get the experience, and they can see what you’re good at. When I worked for Buddy, he was on the financial crimes desk.”
“You think he’ll remember?”
“I’d be surprised if he didn’t. He’s got a mind like a steel trap.”
Spitz gave me the name and number of an assisted living facility in Millbrae.
“Be forewarned: He’s all there, but he is stone-deaf. It can be hard communicating with him over the phone. He’ll appreciate the visit. His wife died a while back, and I don’t think his kids see him that often. I used to have a client in Palo Alto, and whenever I was down I’d try to pop in on him. It’s been a while, though.”
“I’ll send your regards.”
“Please do. There’s not many like him left.”