I appreciated the extra day to heal before my co-workers got a look at my forehead.
As I ate my cereal, I grabbed my phone. I intended to look at some drunk pictures from before I’d smashed my head, but the first photo, the last one taken that night, got my attention.
Griff Bauer. 1841 7th Avenue. Oakland, CA. 94606.
“Are you a fucking idiot? You don’t come to a hospital after a job like that!”
I remembered the menacing voice from the night before.
After a job like that…
Somehow, I didn’t think he was referring to selling Girl Scout Cookies. Something illegal, or at the very least, shady—there was no other way to interpret it.
I looked back down at my phone. With a small sense of foreboding, I read the name and address a second time. From my extremely limited interaction (really, just listening), I knew the two men were up to no good.
But that wasn’t going to stop me.
This was the first day of the rest of my life.
I picked up a coffee at my local Starbuck’s, then made my way to the elevator and down to the basement to pick up my car. But I didn’t arrive unscathed. A fellow Avalon dweller remarked on my stitches as the doors closed.
“What happened?”
“I decided to start the first day of my forties with a trip to the hospital.”
“It was your birthday?”
“No fooling you.”
In full disclosure, I didn’t say that last line. But boy was I tempted.
I was a good human being, and generally a nice guy, but I could be snarky at times. And I had a feeling I was going to get a lot of questions about my forehead in the days to come. I considered a few stories:
- A shark bit me (thank the doctor for that one).
- I fell down an elevator shaft.
- Tom Brady punched me for sleeping with Gisele.
All terrible. Maybe I was more hungover than I thought.
I reached my car and set off for Griff Bauer’s house.
Oakland was a different animal than Walnut Creek. A crime writer there had actual work to do. The frequent murder in Oakland trumped the rare bank robbery in Walnut Creek.
And while 1841 7th Avenue wasn’t the worst part of the city, it wasn’t going to appear on any brochures extolling Oakland’s virtues.
What had once been a nice area had become run down. Dilapidated would be putting it too strongly, but it was headed in that direction. The businesses that weren’t open were all boarded up. That’s never a good sign.
I parked my gray Honda Civic, that of the 117,338 miles, a block short of the address. I realized I had absolutely no plan.
I sat there for twenty minutes, only furthering my opinion that I was ill-prepared.
Maybe Griff Bauer would leave the house with the man who’d reprimanded him, walk by my car, and toss me a note telling me the job he’d been working. Maybe not.
I decided to take things into my own hands. I exited my car and walked toward Mr. Bauer’s house. It was a sleepy Sunday, and there weren’t many people on the street. Probably for the best. I didn’t want some neighbors asking me pointed questions or remembering my face.
I looked up at the numbers and realized I was approaching Bauer’s house. The majority of the homes had experienced readily apparent wear and tear. Mostly small, probably two bedrooms, with tiny backyards enclosed by chain-link fences, they all looked similar, with a new paint job differentiating each from the rest of the block.
It made me grateful for my apartment back in Walnut Creek. No, it wasn’t a house, but I’d prefer living there to one of these ratty old homes in a run-down part of Oakland.
There was no doubt about it; I was being a judgmental prick. Sue me.
Should I walk by his house or just knock? What the hell was I going to say? Would Mr. Bauer recognize me? No, he’d never seen my face, thanks to the partition in our hospital room.
Of course, with stitches covering my forehead, it wouldn’t be crazy for him to assume I’d been at the hospital as well. This was one shitty plan.
I could say I was a reporter doing a story on this specific decaying section of Oakland. It sounded legitimate enough, and I thought it might work. I decided to go with that.
Checking for a house number, I realized I was standing right in front of Mr. Bauer’s.
I immediately knew something was wrong.
The door jamb had been splintered, leaving a four-inch gap between the frame and the front door itself. I looked around, and seeing no one, walked up the three stairs to the door.
I turned around one more time, making sure no one was staring in my direction. The streets were empty.
I peeked through the hole in the door.
On the floor, there was a body. It was unmistakable. A human head had been bashed in, and blood caked the floor surrounding him.
I pulled my eyes away from the door and rubbed them.
Had I really just seen that?
I peered back through the hole. There had been no mistake. A man, with half of his brain beaten in, was sitting on the floor of the home. The assailant had taken special attention to bash his face beyond recognition.
It looked like a melon had been hit by a hammer. Repeatedly.
His right arm was splayed out, and his wrist curled upward.
The man was white, but that’s about all I could deduce.
I’d seen a few dead bodies before, but never one as mangled as the one in front of me. I stepped back and drew in a big breath.
“Hey, you!”
I turned around.
“You’re not trying to break in, are you?” a man approaching seventy said to me from the sidewalk.
“No! Of course not.”
He eyed me suspiciously, but I was standing in front of the crack in the front door.
If he saw that, he’d be more than just suspicious.
“Alright then,” he said. “Just keeping an eye on my neighborhood.”
“Totally understand. I’m going to call my friend’s cell phone right now. I’ll be gone soon.”
That seemed to placate him, and he continued down the street.
He was gone, but I did look suspicious standing there, poking through a hole in the door.
I knew not to touch it. This was going to be a crime scene sometime soon.
Against my better judgment, I decided to walk around the perimeter of the house. I didn’t see anyone else on the street, so I put my shirt over my hand and pushed open the chain-link fence that ran parallel to the house. I was making some odd decisions. But why leave a potential fingerprint?
I walked along the side of the house and looked in the first window I saw.
I had a better view than from the front door. The body was even more mutilated than I’d first realized. It was impossible to tell where the neck ended and the head began. A large hammer rested in the blood next to the body.
My first impression was that it seemed staged. Not the death obviously, but who leaves the murder weapon two feet from the victim?
Unless it was a crime of severe passion. Or made to look that way.
I went into full-on reporter mode, not thinking of the potential repercussions. I pulled out my phone and took pictures of the crime scene through the window. I walked around the house and found a back window that offered a different angle of the body and snapped more pictures.
For a split second, I considered trying a door, but I knew that would be going way, way too far. I was smarter than that. Although, in the moment, I certainly didn’t make many intelligent decisions. Trespassing on a crime scene, even if it was the back yard, was a serious crime.
What I did next was as well.
As I headed back toward the gate, I saw his recycling bins. I grabbed several pieces of mail and some assorted pieces of paper and slid them down my pants.
As I shut the gate and walked out on the street, I didn’t see a soul.
At least not wandering around.
Bu
t down the street, there a car sat at a stop sign, not moving. A few seconds became five, and the car still hadn’t moved. I was standing there, looking guilty as all hell. I decided to head toward my car, keeping an eye on the unmoving vehicle.
Mercifully, the car sped away in the opposite direction. It was probably nothing, but considering my actions, inevitably I was going to be suspicious.
I half walked, half ran to my car. When I arrived, I grabbed the papers from my pants and threw them on the passenger side.
I drove away, full of excitement and regret in equal measure.
By the time I returned to Avalon Walnut Creek, regret had gained the upper hand.
What the hell was I thinking? Taking pictures of a crime scene? Not immediately calling the police? Stealing the dead man’s mail?
I’d made several decisions in the span of a few minutes, and not one of them was the right one.
I could have rectified that, obviously. I should have called the police then and there, telling them I went a little crazy after hearing a weird conversation at the hospital.
That didn’t seem like a great plan, either. I’m sure the Oakland police wouldn’t take kindly to my actions, no matter what my rationale.
While debating what to do, I got a text from Jan Kingston, my editor at the Walnut Creek Times:
Couple of errors in your piece on the recent rash of bike thefts. We’ll talk tomorrow.
The dichotomy between my menial job and the crime I’d just witnessed hung in the air.
I didn’t want to keep writing about bike thefts. I needed to work a real case. Do some actual reporting.
And while my actions were a little murky, it’s not like I’d killed the guy. I was just going to follow the case, and hopefully be a step or two ahead of the police.
This could be my break. Certainly, reporting about the latest Schwinn to be stolen wasn’t going to do the trick.
I wasn’t going to call the cops.
I was going to ride this thing out.
3.
I went into work on Monday morning and was greeted with a few “Happy Birthday”s.
“Forty! You dinosaur, you.”
“Now you can collect Social Security!”
“Were you and Keith Richards rehashing the old days?”
Yes, most of the greetings were based on my age.
Those were followed by comments about the stitches that took up a good three-inch space on my forehead.
I told them the truth about what happened. A few shook their heads, but they were all entertained by the story.
They especially like that I screamed, “This is forty!” with blood spilling down my face.
The office of the Walnut Creek Times was located in a bright red stucco building on North Main Street. Despite the fun I poke at the city, Walnut Creek does actually have a nice downtown area. Some great restaurants, a few good bars, and tons of shopping. If that’s your thing. Newsflash, it’s not mine.
The stucco architecture stood out next to the plain offices that sat to our left and right. The building itself was two stories. I’m not sure if they meant it to serve as a two-tiered hierarchy from the beginning, but that’s what it had become. The editor and upper management (really just three people) operated from the top floor, while the reporters had their desks on the first floor.
The elevator was never used, everyone choosing to take the stairs up and down. The stairs went right up the middle of the building, and the office had a very open feel to it. We had a view of the top floor and they looked down on us. Always literally, sometimes figuratively.
I’d heard some of “upper management” refer to the stairs as The Stairway to Heaven, but my fellow reporters and I had a different name for it: The Walk of Shame.
It was so named because if you were asked to come upstairs, it usually meant something had gone wrong. They didn’t like your idea for a new article, or it needed to be highly edited. You felt like a condemned prisoner walking up those steps, just waiting to be chewed out.
That said, it was a pleasant environment to work in. We all played well together. Our editor, Jan Kingston, got along famously with all the reporters even when taking her red pen to our articles.
Like she did on this day.
“And you actually should have used a semi-colon as opposed to a comma here,” she said, after I’d made the Walk of Shame upstairs.
Even an experienced writer like myself wasn’t above making an error or two. Or three, as was the case with this article. Although Jan did say she liked the piece.
“Thanks,” I said. “I think it’s my favorite stolen bike piece of the year.”
“This isn’t the Wall Street Journal.” She laughed.
My mind couldn’t help but return to what I’d witnessed the previous day.
“Thanks for your help, Jan.”
“You got it.”
I walked back downstairs and made a point of finding an Oakland paper. One nice part of working for a newspaper is that we had subscriptions to approximately ten other papers. A few small local ones, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Times, and several national ones.
I’d worked for the Walnut Creek Times for nine years, and it was sad to no longer read the papers that had vanished over the years. A fear permeated our office, and I imagine it was the same for many newsrooms across the country. The fear that our jobs lived on borrowed time.
And I admit, calling our little office a newsroom was a stretch. There was only seven of us. The reporters were: Trent Buckley; most news stories. Crystal Howell; sports, entertainment. Greg Alm; special interests, weather, obituaries. Myself; crime, some sports, local business write-ups.
Upstairs, we had Jan the editor, and the husband and wife team of Tom and Krissy Butler, who owned the paper and made all final decisions. They published the paper as well as running the website. No one worked harder at the Walnut Creek Times than Tom and Krissy.
As bosses, they were almost always fair, but that didn’t mean they lacked tempers. They were known to drop an F-bomb or three when things fell behind schedule or we’d put out a paper not up to our standards.
In their younger days, Tom had made an obscene amount of money in the financial sector, and Krissy had raised their two children. In 2011, they launched the Walnut Creek Times. Tom had enough money to last a lifetime and they were recent empty nesters, so they’d decided to start a paper in the city where they’d grown up. They’d been high school sweethearts and together for over forty years.
Since inception, they’d kept to their plan for a daily paper from Tuesday to Friday and then a “weekend edition” covering Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. As I mentioned, this allowed the staff to generally work a strict Monday to Friday schedule. The paper was short, usually around ten pages from Tuesday to Friday. The weekend edition held more like twenty-five.
Walnut Creek, population 69,000, lay about twenty-five miles east of San Francisco. While it wasn’t technically a small city, when you’re surrounded by well-known cities like San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley, you get that little brother feel.
And there were times when a city our size couldn’t provide enough news to support a full paper and we needed to fill it with a little fluff. A recent article about a dog giving birth to six puppies came to mind.
But usually we managed to fill it with substantive articles.
Tom and Krissy had been ahead of the curve when it came to marketing. It allowed them to make a relatively small-town paper successful. Tom seemed to know everyone who mattered in the city and all coffee shops, most bars, and several restaurants carried the Walnut Creek Times. At the restaurants, a stand outside usually sold the papers, but coffee shops and bars always had them lying around. The green and white of the Walnut Creek Times was ubiquitous around Walnut Creek itself.
Tom and Krissy knew that paid subscriptions had lost their importance. The number of eyes that found their way to the paper was what mattered. And that’s why they could charge steeper a
dvertising rates than larger papers.
The Butlers were also a step ahead when it came to their online edition. They charged a small fee, but with that came discounts to local businesses, raffles into concerts, and things of that ilk. The paper personified the city of Walnut Creek and that made it a must-read for all locals.
We put forth a good paper, but if it weren’t for the genius of Tom and Krissy Butler, it probably wouldn’t have lasted as long as it already had.
The first person they had hired was me. Jan came next, less than a week later. Followed by Trent, Crystal, and Greg, all within the first year.
And there had been zero turnover since.
Pretty impressive, although the fact that the Butlers were rich and paid us more than your average reporter had a great deal to do with that. The prevailing logic around the newsroom was that we were paid handsomely for a relatively easy job, so why rock the boat?
I’d written for my high school paper and then at The Daily Northwestern during college. Known for its journalistic programs, Northwestern provided its graduates with some esteem, and I got a writing job right out of college for the Chicago Sun-Times. It didn’t last, as they had to make cuts. I had three more writing gigs from Chicago to Las Vegas before coming to California and being hired by Tom and Krissy. The 2000s were a tough time for papers and I was wondering if I’d chosen the right career with all the turnover I was going through. So once I joined the Walnut Creek Times in 2011, I knew I’d be crazy to leave.
But I had always wanted just a little more, and that’s what had led me to Griff Bauer’s house.
Not to say I didn’t enjoy my job; it just wasn’t as fulfilling as one would hope. My writing muscles were assuredly not being flexed. More like becoming atrophied.
But the camaraderie made it worthwhile. Trent was the kid at heart, not above setting down a whoopee cushion for an unsuspecting individual. “In a state of arrested development” would probably most accurately describe him.
Crystal was a hard worker, often staying longer than any other reporter. When she had first joined the paper and we were both single, Tom Butler noticed me flirting with her one day. He walked over and simply said, “Do you like working here?” He didn’t have to say anything else. Two employees dating in a small little newsroom was a recipe for disaster. I stopped hitting on Crystal soon thereafter.
Revenge at Sea: (Quint Adler Book 1) Page 2