77th Street Requiem

by Wendy Hornsby

  “Sorry.” I hate maudlin drunks. Especially when they’re me. “I don’t remember, did I resolve anything?”

  “Only that you’re going to disembowel someone named Olga. Might be a good idea, but promise me you won’t use the good kitchen knives.” He handed me a warm bagel and a plate of lox. “Who’s Olga?”

  “A metaphor for all the bimbettes who hang around the police academy bar on payday.”

  “Ah-ha.” He pushed me the cream cheese. “‘Jealousy, thy name is woman.’”

  “Wrong,” I said, pushing back the cream cheese. “‘Vanity, thy name is woman.’ What you want is, ‘The venomous clamors of a jealous woman, Poisons more deadly than a mad dog’s tooth.’”

  “You can’t find your way home alone, but you can remember that shit?”

  I looked up at him with one eye. “Lyle, Lyle, crocodile.”

  Lyle sat down across from me and reached for one of my hands. He had been flip and sarcastic and funny all through the night before, but that morning I saw genuine concern, real tenderness on his face. “So, you’re in a no-winner, kid. What are you going to do?”

  “To which no-winner do you refer? The house? Sell it at a loss, or keep it at a loss? My sister? Actively let her die, or actively keep her in limbo? Mike?” I had to look away. “Oh, shit. What am I going to do about Mike?”

  “Okay, so I’ll let you use the good knives just this once.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Mike called last night.” He got up and handed me the telephone messages he had taken off the machine. Beginning at 8:53 P.M. Friday, and in order: Mike Flint loved me. My daughter needed money again, Kellenberger said Carlos O’Leary would be in People’s Park. Mike missed me. Jack Newquist felt abandoned. Lana Howard wanted a quote from me for the eleven o’clock news, Guido had information and was considering flying up with it, my parents wanted to reassure me they supported my decision and wanted me for dinner Saturday. At midnight, Mike wanted to know where the hell I was.

  It was still early, so I thought I might catch Mike at home. I dialed, and on the third ring, a woman’s voice said, “Hello.”

  I said, “Is Mike there?” hoping she would say I had mis-dialed.

  “Mike can’t come to the phone,” she said. “I’ll give him a message.”

  I said no thanks and, too nonplussed to ask her who she was, I hung up.

  She could have been a friend of Michael, friend of a friend. I didn’t even mention this conversation to Lyle. I swallowed two aspirin with the last of my coffee and left the room.

  Saturdays Lyle volunteered at the hospice in the Castro. While I took my shower, he put the Beatles on the kitchen CD and made his usual double batch of Alice B. Toklas brownies to take with him; a voluptuous appetite is the key to good health, according to Lyle.

  I came down in time to help with kitchen cleanup. As Lyle carefully put things away in his immaculate cupboards and drawers, I saw his hands linger over the cups and bowls and spoons, as if seeing them for the last time. Saying farewell.

  I said, “Don’t pack your bags yet. The house isn’t even listed.”

  He smiled wistfully. “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-five?”

  “Count on it.” I meant it, but already we were drifting. I loved Lyle like family; since the earthquake we had lived like family. Would the glue hold once we had gone our separate ways? When Mike retired and moved to the woods, what would be different?

  I dropped Lyle at the hospice, then stopped by the network affiliate to send a message down to Lana. My headache was only a dull throb by the time I was back on the Bay Bridge headed east toward Berkeley.

  CHAPTER

  19

  Carlos O’Leary skillfully formed the silver wire in his hands to make an earring loop and snipped off the excess. He didn’t look at me when he asked, “Why should I talk to you?”

  “Hell, I don’t know, Carlos. Why should you talk to me?” I sat on the grass next to him in People’s Park in downtown Berkeley. Once the symbol of grassroots political activism, the park was now a haven for the homeless and the aimless, and an illicit drug superstore. It smelled bad—overfull rent-a-cans—and I didn’t want to be there anymore. After fifteen minutes, a pair of earrings and some idle chatter were all we had accomplished between us. The sun was directly overhead, and I was too warm and too hung over to wait around any longer for Carlos to tell me something useful.

  I turned down Carlos’s offer of a hit from his joint, and started to rise. “Half the country wants to talk to me today, Carlos. If you don’t, well, fine.”

  “Hold on. Hold on. Don’t get all uptight.” He snuffed the end of his joint between two fingers and laid the smoking roach on his tray of crystal beads. He was probably fifty, his face weathered from living outdoors. He was a leftover flower child in purple tie-dye and love beads and Birkenstock sandals, with a beard that looked infested; anywhere but Berkeley, he would have been taken for an escaped lunatic.

  Squinting against the sun, he said, “Maybe we’re having a communication problem here. I just don’t get why a pretty thing like you would want to talk to an old bum like me about ancient history.”

  “A man named Chuck Kellenberger thought you might have some information about the people in the SLA.”

  “Kellenberger?”

  “Kellenberger,” I repeated.

  “Oh, yeah. I know him. Feds.”

  “He said maybe you’d heard the SLA talk about what happened in L.A. before the shoot-out.”

  “Who? Me? He musta got the wrong Carlos O’Leary.”

  “Maybe he did. Look, it’s been just awfully interesting talking to you. But I have some business to take care of.” I stood up and slung my bag over my arm. “See you.”

  “Don’t go away sounding mad, pretty lady.” He picked up the earrings he had just made, long crystal dangles, and extended them toward me. “From me to you. Let me wrap them up for you so their karma doesn’t spill out in that sack of yours.” He twisted the earrings in a scrap of yellow paper and handed them up to me. “Good luck to you.”

  “Good luck to you.” I slipped the earrings into my bag and put a ten into his hand.

  Carlos picked up his smoldering roach and relit the charred end, sucking in a long drag as he did so. By the time I reached the sidewalk, he was swaying to the music of some internal symphony. And I was forgotten.

  As I said, I grew up in Berkeley. Carlos O’Leary was not my only available resource. The demonstration at Emily’s hospital reminded how well connected I was.

  I found my mother’s friend Mrs. Perlmutter setting out tulip bulbs in the sun-washed flower bed at the side of her house. In her broad-brimmed straw hat and denim coveralls, kneeling on the ground, she made a beautiful picture. Tendrils of her hair escaped from under her hat to frame her seamed face in a soft, silver cloud.

  Mrs. Perlmutter’s hearing had been fading for a few years. She apparently didn’t hear me when I took out my camera and knelt on the grass about ten feet from her. I had shot two frames before she sensed I was there, and turned.

  “Oh. Maggie, dear. It’s you.” She barely registered surprise, only tucked in a stray curl. “Do you want me to do something? Show some leg?”

  “I like you as I see you, Mrs. Perlmutter.” I softened the focus when she was full face to the lens and snapped a third frame. Then I put the camera away and walked over to her. “You look beautiful. I’ll send you prints.”

  She reached up a gloved hand to me, gripped me firmly, impelled me down beside her. Then she passed me a spade and a bucket of bonemeal. “I was hoping you would drop by. And here you are, just as in the old days, and with your camera. I once asked your mother if she would let me have one of your school pictures so that I would know what you looked like. All I ever saw of you was the business end of a camera.”

  I laughed. “Holding a camera in front of my face was as close to being invisible as I could get. It still is.”

  She smile
d fondly up into my face. “You were always a different sort of child, little Margot. Always knew exactly what you wanted.”

  “Did I?” I dumped about a teaspoonful of bonemeal into the three-inch hole she had gouged from the mulched earth. “It seemed to me, as a kid, that life was a massive, formless landscape that I wandered over without a road guide, perpetually lost.”

  “And all these years I thought you were one of the few with dead-reckoning.” She chuckled softly, and handed me a tulip bulb. “What brings you by now, dear?”

  “The Symbionese Liberation Army.”

  “Yikes.” She raised her hands in mock horror. “Haven’t even thought about that mob for years. Are they your new project?”

  “They’re part of it.”

  “I’m flattered you thought I could help. But how?”

  “You just know things.” I planted another bulb. “There was a brief resurgence of the SLA in Berkeley after the shoot-out in L.A.”

  “Brief and violent,” she said firmly. “They painted graffiti all over town, Death to the Fascist Insect That Preys upon the Life of the People. Not very original, were they?”

  “Do you know where any of those people are now? Anyone I could talk to?”

  “I suppose the ones still in prison would be easy enough to find; whether or not they would talk is, I suppose, a separate issue. Henry Gates might help you there.” She tipped back her hat. “You remember the Gateses? He was a federal judge before his stroke.”

  “How is Judge Gates?” I asked.

  She was thinking hard, was already way past Judge Gates. She said, “Sara Jane Moore.”

  “Sara Jane Moore?” It took a moment for the name to click. “She took a shot at President Ford?”

  “You have a good memory, just like your mother,” she said. “You should talk to Sara Jane. I’m sure she’s still in prison somewhere. She was the liaison between the Hearst family and the SLA during the ransom negotiations, a bookkeeper I think, stayed on with Hearst for quite a while to get through the paperwork. She was not only a confidant of the SLA left in Berkeley, but also a paid FBI and police informant.”

  “Did I hear you say April Fool?”

  “No. Really. Talk to her.”

  “How do you know this woman?”

  “From here and there. She would march with us in Another Mother for Peace demonstrations,” she said. “She had some inherited money. I think that’s the only reason those SLA kids would even speak with her. The woman was obsessed with Patty Hearst, called her family at all hours, tried to negotiate her release. She spoke of nothing else. Maybe she had a hero complex, I don’t know. She so wanted to be the one to bring in Patty that when the FBI did the honors without her, she went off her rocker. She tried to shoot President Ford only a few days after the FBI arrested Patty.”

  “Could I trust anything she might tell me?”

  “Ah. Good point.” Her gaze trailed off and she planted another tulip while she thought. And then she looked up at me with her clear blue eyes. “Let’s go inside and call Henry.”

  Using my shoulder for support, Mrs. Perlmutter rose to her feet, wincing when she straightened her knees.

  The first thing Judge Gates said about the SLA was, “They got away with murder.” I had an expectant chill before he named the victim. “Mrs. Myrna Opsahl. A fine woman, the mother of four. Mrs. Opsahl was gutshot during a bank robbery in the Sacramento area. Witnesses at the bank said that Emily Harris pulled the trigger. If I remember correctly, the three survivors from Los Angeles, Hearst and the two Harrises and a few new recruits were hiding out over there. They supported themselves by painting houses and robbing banks. I believe they were trying to raise funds to break the Marcus Foster killing suspects out of jail. The bank robbery was well planned—something about garaging stolen cars well in advance, buying disguises. They made off with something like twenty thousand dollars.”

  “And killed a woman,” I said. “What you’ve told me sounds very consistent with other SLA capers. But it isn’t the caper I’m interested in. Mrs. Opsahl may not be the only murder the SLA got away with.”

  “What do you think I can tell you?” Judge Gates asked.

  “Names. Anyone who might have been in contact with them around the time they were in Los Angeles.”

  “I’ll ask around, but I don’t hold out much hope that anyone will talk to you. There’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

  “If you hear anything at all, you can reach me through Mrs. Perlmutter.”

  I must have shown my disappointment when I hung up. Mrs. Perlmutter insisted that I have a glass of tea before leaving her house. With promises to call, we said good-bye.

  I crossed town to Emily’s nursing home, feeling prickly enough to take on all comers. There were a dozen pickets still working the line—Ashes to Ashes, but in the Lord’s Own Time—and a pair of city police watching over them. The demonstrators stayed on the sidewalk out front and said nothing to me as I walked up the street. There was no visible press.

  The headline on the local paper in the rack beside the front door said, Duchamps Lingers near Death.

  Emily had passed a quiet night. I helped her day nurse bathe her and struggle her into a fresh cotton gown.

  All of her life, Emily had been a formidable athlete, a runner, a swimmer like me; there was never an extra ounce to jiggle on her six-foot frame. Now the thin layer of flesh still hanging on her bones was atrophied and flaccid and ugly. There was nothing left of her except a pair of rock-hard breasts riding high on her chest.

  When I said Emily didn’t have any jiggle, her chest was included. She had never had anything more than buttons on her rib cage. Then, a few weeks before she was shot, and for reasons I will never know, my unadorned, pragmatic sister had an industrial-size set of saline-filled breasts surgically installed.

  While she wasted away to nothing, those artificial, imitation accessories remained unaffected. I imagined her being dug up a few aeons hence and still having them firm and in place. Then, out of nowhere, I was crying.

  The ridiculous picture that flashed through my mind was the first time I had accepted that Emily was going to end up in a coffin. Nothing is real to me until I have a picture of it in my mind, and there it was, in full color, with startling clarity: Emily buried in the gown I had just buttoned up, twin mounds filling out the lacy bodice. Emily really and truly was going to die.

  I kissed Em’s cold cheek. Then I picked up the packet of legal documents with the hospital administrator’s signature on the line below mine, his official acknowledgment of the terms, and went back outside.

  I didn’t know quite what to do with myself. My parents were out making preparations for their big trip, and I didn’t want to sit around their house alone. They expected me for dinner, a formal send-off. Otherwise, I would have gone to the airport and taken the first flight south.

  Ever since my talk with Carlos O’Leary, I had felt oddly edgy. There was so much to be done in L.A. and I was cut off from it. I was bothered by my conversations with Mrs. Perl-mutter and Judge Gates, unsure who the real lunatics were. I had just about decided that everyone involved with the SLA was a loose cannon and beyond deciphering.

  With nothing better to do, I walked into campus, past the physics buildings, to the Phoebe Apperson Hearst grove, and sat down on a stone bench beside an arch dedicated to Patty’s great-grandmother. I wondered whether O’Leary’s earrings had spilled their karma in my bag. I took them out to get a better look at them.

  The earrings were actually very pretty, a bit big for my taste, but interesting. I thought that Casey would like them, and started to wrap them back up. That’s when I noticed the writing on the wrapper: “M. E. Duchamps. Come. 1:00. Love, Kellenberger.” And there was an address in Sausalito.

  All the time that I sat in the park with O’Leary, he never touched a writing implement. I was sufficiently intrigued to drive down to the marina to catch a Sausalito ferry.

  It was already after three when th
e ferry left the berth. It was nearly four when I found the Sausalito address: a houseboat moored at the end of a long slip, with an unobstructed view of the San Francisco skyline across the bay. It was so late, I didn’t expect Kellenberger to still be around.

  The houseboat was fairly new, a confection of carved wood and stained glass. I could hear Chopin inside when I knocked on the door.

  A middle-aged man wearing a golf shirt and khaki shorts stood in the open door and grinned at me. “Hello, pretty lady. Come in.”

  “Maybe you should come out, Carlos,” I said. His beard and straggly hair were but an illusion of memory.

  Chuck Kellenberger stepped into view behind him. “You’re late. But we saved you some lunch, anyway. Come on in.”

  “Lunch?” I said. “Your invitation was pretty iffy, Kellenberger. What made you think I would come at all? I might not have seen your little note for days. Maybe never.”

  Kellenberger, dour desk jockey no more, chuckled happily. “I knew you’d find my note. I just didn’t think you’d be so slow about it.”

  “I had things to do,” I said. “Wouldn’t it have been easier to just call and arrange a meeting at a McDonald’s or someplace and skip the dramatics in the park and the coded message?”

  “Too risky,” Carlos said.

  “Risky for whom?” I asked.

  “Carlos had to look you over before he would talk to you,” Kellenberger said. “He decided you were okay. Trust me, he’s more worried about you than you are about him. Right, Carlos?”

  I looked from one to the other. “You like to play games.”

  “It’s no game.” Carlos handed me a Polaroid of the two of us in the park, and one shot of me full face, but focused on the people behind me. “Recognize anyone?”

  I said, “Damn,” when I spotted Jack Newquist peering through a juniper hedge. “How did he find me?”

  “You weren’t trying to hide,” Carlos said.

  “He’s a journalist,” I said. “Journalists do a fair amount of skulking around.”