“I don’t need to be bugged, because I have a whole roomful of witnesses.”
The women had formed a circle around us and stood listening with rapt stillness. Ridgeway’s circuit of their faces stopped when the woman with the rosary held the beads out to him. She said, “Confession is good for the soul.”
I said, “She’s right. What might have been different?”
“Frady might have made his twenty-five years,” he said. “It was because of me he went down to Manchester and Main that night. We’d been talking up at the academy about how JoAnn didn’t mean enough to either of us for her to be the cause of bad feelings between us. We were going to bury the hatchet, meet like it was a normal end of watch—a fresh start—have a beer in the usual place.”
He fingered the rosary beads, as if each one represented a step along his path that night twenty years ago. “I left the academy before Frady did. I stopped for more drinks on the way, picked up a girl—Michelle—fooled around till I was late. But Roy waited; he was a better man than me, more serious about patching things up.
“When I got to the lot there on the corner, he was talking to a couple of chicks. If I had been on time, if I had been sober, I would have gone with him, or he would have come with me. But I was so far gone, Roy just told me to go sleep it off and we could talk later. Last I saw him, he was getting into his car with the girls.”
“Getting into his own car?”
He nodded.
“Did you recognize the girls?”
“Michelle knew one of them.”
“A friend she used to dance with?” I said.
He must have prayed too hard; he broke the beads. He studied the two ends with a guilty look on his face, squashed as if he had committed yet another unforgivable transgression.
If Ridgeway was telling the truth, then Mike’s version of that night had been closer than mine in some important details. I steeled myself, knowing I was going to hear about it for a long time. But I took Ridgeway by the arm and steered him toward the stairs. I said, “Now that you’ve told your story once, it won’t be hard for you to tell it a second time.”
CHAPTER
26
PATRICIA HEARST: [In Los Angeles] Cinque wanted to get busy doing what he called “search and destroys.”
F. LEE BAILEY: Search and destroys? Who was to be searched, and who was to be destroyed?
P.H.: Police.
F.L.B.: Police? And how was he going to go about that?
P.H.: He was going to go out and just have everyone steal a car, and do the search and destroy, and then take over a house after, and stay there. And do that every night.
—From the trial transcript, The United States of America v. Patricia Campbell Hearst, February 18, 1976 (CR. 74-364-JC)
The sun was just rising behind the Oakland hills on the far side of the bay when the paramedics arrived. The blue-black water of the bay flashed fire red and then faded to deep green, all within the minute it took for the emergency crew to grab their gear and run down the gangplank to the houseboat.
Kellenberger lay on the polished floor of the houseboat, his bandages soaked through and reeking. His head was turned to the side and his eyes were open to watch the sunrise. He said, “How beautiful.”
“Yes it is,” I said. I sat on the floor beside him.
Even as the paramedics knelt to tend him, he kept his eyes on the bay. “How is your sister?”
“She had another seizure last night.”
“I always liked her. She was the enemy, but I liked her.”
“Am I the enemy, too, Kellenberger?”
“No, honey. Sorry you got in the way.”
“That’s all you have to say to me? Sorry?”
“You understand.”
“No, I don’t,” I said. The blanket I tucked up under his chin didn’t keep him from shivering. “Did Carlos O’Leary drive you up here?”
“There is no Carlos O’Leary.”
When the first paramedic pulled away Thea’s dressing to see what he had to work with, the wound began to bleed again. His partner was taking vitals. They exchanged a look, a solemn shake of the head, just the way a movie doctor would tell John Wayne that Gabby Hayes wasn’t going to make it. Kellenberger would appreciate the image, I thought. As a matter of form, the medics started an IV and prepped the patient to be moved.
“Why did you grab me?” I asked him. “What were you going to do with me?”
“I don’t know. You weren’t supposed to be there, remember? I didn’t want you to die in the fire, that’s all. You kept going in after that damn dog.”
Mike was outside on the deck talking with Jack, my erstwhile Rolling Stone man. All the subterfuge around my first visit to the houseboat became clear when Jack showed us his ID. Special Agent John Newquist, FBI, was assigned to keep an eye on an agent under a cloud, Charles Kellenberger, and to figure out why he was so interested in me. The Bureau didn’t like the answer Kellenberger gave when they questioned his request for informant money. Desk jockeys don’t need informants, travel money, and sudden time off.
“I don’t get it, Kellenberger,” I said.
“Sure you do.” In full sunlight, he had no color. I had never seen a living human as bloodlessly pale. “It was me or them.”
Three people were dead because Kellenberger had a twenty-year-old secret to protect. The stakes were his name, his career, the image of the Bureau. His pension.
I was nudged aside so that the paramedics could move Kellenberger from the floor to a stretcher. He reached for my hand. “Will you ride with me, honey? I don’t want to die alone.”
I said, “Sure,” because at that point it didn’t matter to me that I had shot him in self-defense. The bottom line was, I had shot him, and that fact pained me deeply. I took his cold hand and walked beside him to the ambulance. Mike and Newquist met us there.
I said to Newquist, “You should get a different cover. You make a lousy journalist. You’re not hungry enough.” I handed him the Polaroids Kellenberger took of him lurking at People’s Park. “And you stick out.”
“We had to come up with something in a hurry. That cover was the best we could do. You’re not easy to tag.” He pulled out a set of handcuffs and snapped one cuff on Kellenberger’s wrist, the other on the stretcher frame.
“Is that necessary?” I asked.
“It’s procedure,” he said. And then he stopped me from getting into the ambulance behind the stretcher.
“Can I have more time with him?” I asked.
Newquist checked with the paramedics, got the same hopeless-prospects frown, and told me to go ahead.
Alone for five minutes, I crouched beside Kellenberger. “Was it you at Hector’s Sunday afternoon?”
“Yeah.” His breathing was shallow. “Bad move. Didn’t think it through. Been out of the field for too long. I guess you could say I panicked. That Melendez—all the shit he got ahold of through the goddamn Freedom of Information Act—he had us hammered.”
“What did he find out?”
“Frady. Maybe the LAPD and the FBI didn’t get along back then, but it never was okay to let an officer go down.”
“You knew Frady was going to be shot?”
“No way” sounded like a chest gurgle. “All we knew was, the girl he thought he was going to get lucky with was in the SLA. Those knotheads talked all the time about kidnapping a cop, so that’s all we thought they were up to. We thought we could go in and take him back, and take Patty Hearst back, any time we wanted to. We had information coming from that house.”
“Nancy Ling Perry talked to Michelle Tarbett.”
“You got it. People underground need an outside person. Nancy picked Michelle. Tried to recruit her for the revolution. Michelle was a source for us on a lot of things. Her boss was into the mob and we liked to keep an eye on him.”
“Hector figured it out, too,” I said.
“He was getting awful damn close. Problem was this: after the fact, we neglected to i
nform LAPD that we had information relating to Frady’s whereabouts and companions the night he died. We weren’t ready to go in on the SLA, and we didn’t want the LAPD fucking things up.”
“If you had been more cooperative, there might never have been a shoot-out.”
“What if, what if, what if. You can’t rewrite history.”
“Isn’t that exactly what you’ve been trying to do?” I said. “What happened at Hector’s on Sunday?”
He looked at the tube running into his cuffed hand. “If I live, I’ll deny I ever said a word of this.”
“Hope you get that chance.”
“Yeah.” He pulled out the IV and held it up to show me. “Insurance.”
“I made a promise, keep yours.”
“Sunday night. I was talking to Melendez when the old woman called for help. I went up with him, two for the price of one. Hector was a pro; he didn’t need help. He calmed the kid right down, got him to take his meds. Ten minutes, he was home free. But I saw an opportunity to save my butt and I took it, that’s all.”
“Why were you carrying a throwaway gun unless you intended to use it?”
“Contingency planning.”
“Three people,” I said. “How valuable do you think your butt is?”
“Don’t beat yourself up worrying about it. They all played their parts. Except the kid who went down with Hector. He didn’t want to die, he just wanted to get locked up. I feel real bad about him.”
“I bet you do. Did you use Thea as your mole to find out what we were doing, what we had found out?”
He chuckled. “She was happy to help any little way she could.”
“One more thing, Kellenberger. Did you fuck Thea?”
He gave me a wan yet gallant grin. “Sure. We both needed it.”
The paramedics came to the door, bounded in when they saw the dangling IV line. I was ordered, “Out.”
“Good-bye, Kellenberger,” I said, releasing his hand. “Any last words?”
“Yeah.” He winked at me. “Go ahead and tell Thea I loved her. Why not, huh?”
“In lieu of payment? Was that how you kept Michelle in line?”
He smiled, patted his round belly. “I wasn’t always fat and bald, honey.”
I got out, went straight over to Mike, and put my head against his shoulder. “Goddamn,” I said.
The ambulance doors closed and it drove away, without lights and sirens. Jack was the first to speak.
“How did you know to look here?” he asked.
“I didn’t,” I said. “The houseboat was just one more possibility. Once it was clear that Ridgeway wasn’t our man, then we had to look at everyone else who had some connection, go through a process of elimination. In the end, Kellenberger was the only one left. That’s when I thought about this place. He brought me here last week to find out how much I knew.”
“Every step of the way, he was setting up Ridgeway,” Mike said. “And doing a pretty good job of it.”
I nudged Mike in the ribs. “Say it. Get it over with. Say I told you so.”
“Not me.” There was an evil little light in his eyes. “I wouldn’t stoop that low.”
I said, “Uh-huh,” and started walking toward the lot where we had left my father’s car.
He called after me: “But I told you from day one, no cop killed Frady.”
CHAPTER
27
Christmas Eve, Casey, the Snow Queen, jetéd across the Nutcracker stage. Her long, skinny arms and legs had acquired solid, round, mature muscle during the two months she had been in Houston.
My mother began to weep as soon as my daughter appeared, stage left. It was difficult for me not to follow suit, but I wanted to seem composed for Casey, whether I was or not. She had warned me: the Snow Queen’s mother should not bawl, gush, or give her more than one bouquet of flowers during curtain calls. Decorum, please; there were professional dance company scouts in the audience.
My father, his eyes brimming, leaned in close to me to whisper, “My God, she looks so much like Emily. I never realized.”
He was right. Tall and graceful and bursting with cocky athleticism, Casey was truly cast in the image of her late aunt Emily. Emily left us no children of her own, and so I took comfort in seeing the resemblance passed to the next generation through my own daughter. I missed Emily.
Casey executed a leap that made her audience gasp. Mike slipped his hand under my elbow. When I looked up at him, he gave me his wink, no more than a gathering together of his crow’s-feet. He said, “She should try out for the Olympics.”
Emily had passed away the week after Thanksgiving. There had been no seizure, no stroke, no medical dramatics of any kind. One night, shortly after midnight, Emily simply ceased to breathe. She had been alone in her room, so no one could say exactly what her last moments were like. But the nurse who discovered Emily during regular rounds told us that the sheets were still folded neatly right up under her chin: no pain, no struggle.
Christmas in Houston had turned out to be a blessing for us all, a break from traditions that would have been painful to go through because Emily was no longer a part of our celebration. Surrounded by my family and our closest friends, dazzled by my nearly grown daughter, I could not remember ever feeling happier. Even my ex-husband and his next wife—a Houston native—sitting in the row behind us did not spoil my sense of contentment.
The Frady film was in final editing, and I was more than pleased with the shape it was taking. Two crimes: the straightforward terrorist murder of Roy Frady, and Kellenberger’s tangled cover-up. The contrasts were both stark and full of irony: one death spawned four.
On the editing room floor there was, figuratively, a piece of discarded tape, a sequence of Kellenberger walking into Hector’s apartment the night Hector died, and a voice-over, Emily Harris reading the eulogy to her dead comrades, chanting, “Death to the Fascist insect that preys upon the lives of the people.” Guido had put it together as a joke. And I had excised it because some things aren’t funny.
The Snow Queen was called back for two bows; a dozen friends and relatives can make plenty of noise. And when it was over, and the kisses and gifts had been delivered, and the white tutu was replaced with red sweats, Casey was still so high that she needed the tethering of her grandfather’s long arms to guide her into one of the two limos hired to ferry her entourage of admirers back to the hotel.
Wearing a tiara that Michael braided out of ribbons taken from her bouquets, Casey presided over an elegant post-theater supper set up in the sitting room of the suite shared by my parents and the Perlmutters: a Houston blowout was their holiday gift to each other. There was cake and champagne, and another round of accolades for our ballerina. And then Casey crashed.
When she was tucked into bed in her room, with R.E.M. playing on her CD as antidote to two months of “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies,” Mike and I retired to our own room next door.
I slipped a tape into the VCR.
Mike, nuzzling my neck, unzipping the back of my dress, said, “I’d rather do it than watch it.”
“Gift from Lana; Guido brought it with him.” I pushed Play. “It’s a roughcut of the dramatization we filmed. I want you to see it, see if I got it right.”
“Okay.” He pulled me down on the bed with him and wrapped himself around me as the screen filled with the interior of the Hot-Cha Club. He kissed the back of my neck. “You won. It’s black-and-white.”
“I lost. It’s a dramatized recreation.”
This section of the film begins at around eleven o’clock on May 10. Sal Ypolito narrates as the actors portraying Barry and Michelle play out their scene: a raunchy dance, several drinks, they’re asked to leave. “I couldn’t have that kind of activity in my place. I run a class establishment. It ain’t right to speak ill of the dead, but that Michelle didn’t know when to stop unless someone told her. So I told her, take the drunk cop home.”
The narrative is picked up by Barry Ridgeway as the actor
s appear outside the liquor store at the corner of Manchester and Main. “I’d had too much to drink—but that was par for the course for me in those days. When Michelle and I left the Hot-Cha, we went over to the corner where I was supposed to meet Roy. I didn’t expect him to be there so late, but he was. Maybe he was waiting for me, or maybe he was waiting to get lucky. When I got there, he was swapping tongue with these two good-looking women. One of them was a friend of Michelle, a dancer named Nancy. Her friend started coming on to me, said I should dump Michelle and make it a double date with them. Michelle got pretty hot. So we left. I saw Roy get into his car with the two women and head north on Main Street, up toward the station. That was the last I saw him.”
The actors portraying Michelle and Barry try to have sex in her car, but he’s too drunk, so she takes him to his car in the Seventy-seventh Street Division parking lot, wrestles him into the backseat. And then she calls her FBI contact, Charles Kellenberger, and tells him that the SLA has picked up a cop. Kellenberger tells her to keep her mouth shut and to keep pumping her mole in the SLA. Then he makes a date with her. Fade out.
My voice comes on and explains that what happens next is only my best guess. Frady, blindfolded and handcuffed, his shoelaces tied together, is paraded in front of the nine residents of 833 West Eighty-fourth Street. Nancy hands the officer’s gun to one of the others, who tucks it into his belt. The group debates whether they should keep Frady as a hostage, but there are too many liabilities. So they bundle the young cop into the trunk of a car stolen for the purpose—a low-rider’s green Buick Riviera. Frady is driven away by three people. The Nancy actress, wearing an Afro wig, drives.
Frady’s own car is taken down the freeway, with an SLA van following. The car is dumped and wiped clean. This scene is shot in deep shadow that masks the drivers because, though I have my own ideas, I cannot know who of the nine, or how many of the nine, they were.
Cut to an approximation of the burned-out house on West Eighty-ninth Street. Frady is marched into the ruins by his SLA captors and made to kneel. Mike narrates: “Roy Frady was shot execution style with a semiautomatic pistol. There were numerous wounds to his head and body. No witnesses have come forward. Sometime between midnight and one A.M., neighbors heard a single shot, followed by five or six more in a burst.” Frady falls forward; I declined to have the sound of gunfire added to the loop. But when the shooters leave Frady alone, in the background we hear a car drive off, and laughter.
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