by Larry Hill
“Sorry,” grunted the short one as he grabbed hold of Klein’s wrists and cinched up the metal bracelet, his charge’s hands behind his back.
“Get me my leather jacket, Jen.” He was aware that one never left one’s house in San Francisco without a wrap and he had seen enough TV news to know that alleged felons usually cover themselves with their jackets when being taken from the home or workplace in handcuffs. And, he wanted to make sure that any photographic record of the event included prime label, expensive clothing. He assumed that there were news photographers camped in front of his house. There’d probably be a bunch of paparazzi at the station too. His wife brought the Argentine jacket and draped it over his shoulders.
“I want to ride downtown with my husband.”
“Sorry Mam, that’s not possible. You’ll have to drive down yourself and, frankly, you won’t be able to see your husband for quite a while.”
“I’m going anyway. Where can I park?”
“You’ll have to figure that out for yourself Mrs. Klein.” The tall one smirked, knowing that parking played a role in most every San Francisco discussion.
Fred, cuffed, was unable to get the jacket over his head, but his front yard was free of photographers and the only person visible was a Filipina maid pushing a stroller with twins. She paid no attention to the drama across the street.
Jennifer had walked tearfully to the curb, trailing the three men. “I love you, Freddy!” she said after the back door was slammed behind her husband. He was looking straight down and showed no sign of having heard her.
Frederick Aaron Klein was born in the early 1930s on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the product of the marriage of Benjamin Klein of Vienna and Emma Pearlstein of the Ukraine. His parents had come to the US via Ellis Island in the first decade of the twentieth century with the great flood of Jewish immigrants from Europe. An academic musicologist who had done research on Mendelssohn, Ben thrived, relatively speaking, during the Depression on the faculty of NYU – that is to say, he stayed employed throughout the thirties. Emma mothered Fred and his older sister, Esther, spending untold hours schooling them after school. She was a lover of mathematics, English literature and Yiddish, expertly imparting those skills to her offspring. Both the Klein and Pearlstein families suffered devastating losses to the Nazis.
Esther graduated from Barnard, got a PhD at Harvard then returned to Barnard, joining the faculty there in English. She wrote a thesis on some obscure passages from Paradise Lost and stuck with Milton to earn tenure. She never married. She had a succession of exotic, younger female friends and associates. The word lesbian was never uttered by a parent or brother in the presence of another.
Fred, a lackluster high school student, deficient in social graces and athletic prowess, enrolled at the City College and graduated with honors 5 years later from NYU; he labored in the thought that he was only able to transfer downtown to NYU thanks to his father having a word with the admissions office. He never asked for help or for the answer as to whether or not he got it. Prior to university, he had only one close friend, Art Schofield. Art went on to Rutgers and Fred’s sociability improved greatly at NYU; he ran for student body president, losing by a handful of votes.
His parents wanted him to major in math or science and follow his father into academia but he opted for business, specializing in marketing, and he excelled. He forsook the offer to get an MBA at Columbia, accepting instead an offer to join a small but growing advertising firm. Being out of school took from him the automatic exemption from the draft, so to his chagrin, he was drafted. The Police Action in Korea rekindled America’s need for combat troops, making Klein a likely candidate for a government-sponsored trip to East Asia. He lobbied hard against that opportunity and was sent to clerk-typist school. He could have entered officer candidate school, but that would have obligated him to another two years in uniform. So, Klein typed, and typed accurately and quickly. He quickly rose through the cadre of male typists, landing a sought-after position in Headquarters Company of his brigade at Fort Dix. In that position, he typed personnel documents, based on decisions of officers, that determined where members of his brigade were to go and for how long they were to go there. One of the handwritten lists of transfers included the name Klein, Frederick. He was to be assigned to McArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo. The job sounded cushy and even interesting, but it was all too evident that with the move to Japan came the very high likelihood of a transfer across the East China Sea to the land below, and above, the 38th parallel where he would be faced with the unpleasantness of bullets, mortar rounds, and deathly cold. He simply left his name off the orders, extending his tour of duty. His reputation was such that the orders were signed by the Major without a close perusal. Later, he found a way to get himself discharged a full six weeks before his tour was scheduled to end.
After discharge from the Army, he opted not to return to his previous employment but to seek an MBA, enrolling in Stanford Business School; weather was his primary motivation. Shortly after matriculation he met Barbara Ann Newman, a junior undergraduate on The Farm. She was the granddaughter of a rabbi and daughter of a cardiologist from Beverly Hills. In the fifties, there was little in the way of cohabitation of the unmarried; Barbara and Fred were not pacesetters. They overnighted on rare occasion; she kept her dorm room and he his studio apartment in Menlo Park. Both sets of parents were pleased that they did not stray from the faith, although Dr. and Mrs. Newman would have preferred their new in-laws to have come from a more presentable academic field than musicology – history or perhaps European literature. Days after he received his MBA, they were married at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple in LA; the reception took place at the recently constructed Beverly Hilton.
Barbara found a job in the fledgling field of television advertising, selling ads to Los Angeles super markets and auto painters – Any car, any color, twenty nine ninety five. As a recently minted MBA from Stanford, Fred was hot property. With some encouragement from his wife, he too went into TV, joining the administration of a newly created local station, KLAT, Channel 6. Within two years, he was elevated to chief financial officer and three years thereafter, with the financial aid of his father-in-law and some doctor cohorts from Cedars-Sinai Hospital, he bought out the owners of KLAT, kept it for a decade, making it the favorite of the burgeoning Latino community, and sold it for twenty times what he and his minority partners had paid. He gave large chunks of cash to the doctors and kept the rest for himself. Klein was rich.
He and Barbara added three male heirs during the first ten years of their marriage – Jason, then two years later, the identical twins, Phillip and Robert. Each graduated college in 4 years – Berkeley, Yale, and UCLA.
From the late sixties on, his work involved “husbanding his investments.” With little outside advice, he invested well: Intel, Microsoft, Amgen and others enabled him to become one of California’s wealthiest unemployed citizens.
The family fortune did not confer long life to his wife. Barbara started bleeding but did not seek medical intervention, assuming the blood was a result of her hemorrhoids that had appeared with the twin pregnancy. Eventually, the doctors at Cedars-Sinai discovered liver metastases when they confirmed the suspected colon cancer. Chemotherapy and surgery, if anything, shortened her life, making the four months between diagnosis and death terrible for her and her family. She was sixty.
Fred could not stay in Los Angeles. The sight of his in-laws, now in their eighties, instilled guilt. He assumed that they blamed him for not making her seek medical care earlier, although there were never words to back up the assumption. Jason, the eldest, lived nearby; he liked Jason, he didn’t love Jason and he very much did not like, or love, Jason’s Korean-American wife and their two success-at-any-cost children, 7 and 11.
The twins had long since moved to the Bay Area, Phillip to San Francisco, Robert to Piedmont in the East Bay. Both were doctors, Robert, ironically in view of his mother’s cause of death, a gastroenterologist,
and Phillip a radiologist. Both married Jewish girls; Robert and spouse had two daughters eighteen months apart. Phillip and his wife had a son. He had Down’s syndrome. They opted against having more children. Fred decided that he’d rather live in San Francisco than in Southern California. He never considered any other state.
In San Francisco, he quickly bought the big Pacific Heights home with a view of Alcatraz and Berkeley. He moved to the area with his true love, his dachshund, Riley, and early on in his Bay Area tenure, met Jennifer Taylor, the Methodist, walking her pug, Bernie, in the park. She had recently divorced when her wealthy husband took up with a professional golfer. Fred asked Jennifer for coffee within fifteen minutes of their dog-specific first conversation. Then dinner, then a movie, then more dinners, more movies and more coffee. Conversations progressed from canines to politics to dead or departed spouses to loneliness. In spite of the three decade age difference, they clicked. Each enjoyed the other’s company. Fred wondered why Jennifer, so much younger, so bright and funny, so attractive and so financially unneedy, had any interest in him, but he didn’t ask. Four months after they met, they decided to move in together. Her house, only two blocks from Fred’s, was a bedroom and lanai smaller, so when, another six months later, they settled on marriage, they sold hers and kept his. She had no kids to make these decisions harder. Both dogs died within a year of the move and were not replaced.
Jen and Fred showed up in the society pages of the Chronicle with regularity. He, like ninety percent of San Franciscans, was a Democrat – or at least not a Republican - and contributed handsomely to candidates for everything from governor to membership on the Party’s central committee. Like so many rich men and women without gainful employment, he launched a bid for public office just a few years after moving north, running for County Supervisor in his silk-stocking neighborhood. He spent a not insignificant portion of his expendable monies on the campaign but finished a distant third to an Italian-surname woman native San Franciscan who lived two blocks away. Although not members of a synagogue, the Kleins were benefactors of Jewish/Israeli NGOs; Fred had served on boards or advisory committees of several. He was an outspoken advocate of silent auctions as a way to raise cash for charities; he bought trips, dinners, and paintings at outlandish prices and, not infrequently, gifted those purchases to other worthy causes.
Klein considered himself happy. He had resettled to a city with better art, better music, and better food than Los Angeles. He had married a gorgeous young woman from the sexual post-revolution and didn’t have any of the libidinos discomforts of the pre-revolution; if anything, he consummated more frequently, with the help of pharmaceuticals, from seventy to seventy five than he did from fifty to fifty five.
Fred Klein never, for a minute, thought that he might ever be charged with a felony.
JAIL
The blue Ford in which Klein was given his ride from Pacific Heights to the main police station needed upholstery work and a new muffler. The back cushion of the rear seat had been worn through, presumably by a succession of steel handcuffs and unclipped fingernails. A foul odor, combining those of urine and vomit, reeked; Fred wished for an open window but none was offered. The closed windows weren’t tinted so he could see the homes of his friends and neighbors, including most of the wealthiest San Franciscans. He was pleased that he saw nobody that he knew.
South of Market, once the home of bars, brothels, fleabag motels and small business and industry, has been much gentrified in recent decades. There’s no such up-scaling of the large police station and jail at 7th and Bryant. Klein’s only pre-knowledge of the place came from the old TV show, The Lineup, which he watched avidly in the fifties in New York. Like the blue Ford, the place needed work. The stucco exterior hadn’t hosted a painter in twenty years; the sidewalks around the place were unpoliced – trash, including whiskey bottles and beer cans, fast food boxes and Styrofoam containers, old Chronicles and empty cigarette packs, was everywhere. The short cop drove and took the car into the dark, dank garage. Fred removed himself from the car, the hand of the tall cop over his head to prevent his colliding with the roof. The short one talked to an ununiformed black woman behind a heavy screen while the short one held his prisoner by the chain connecting the two cuffs. Klein noted that he was the only person in the large room whose moves were controlled by a uniformed cop. It was, after all, about 1 PM, not the busy time for downtown arrests. He was guided gently to the screen.
“Name,” growled the woman. Her stringy grey-brown hair barked for shampoo.
“Klein. Frederick Aaron Klein.”
“Spell it.” He rattled off the letters. When he reached the two A’s she told him to slow down.
“Date of birth.”
“January 15, 1930. Exactly one year after Martin Luther King.” Fred thought there’d be something to be gained by the coincidence. His questioner was unmoved.
Klein responded to subsequent brusque demographic inquiries in a pleasant manner. He knew from TV the consequences of acting hostilely during early stages of the process.
After the initial paper work, Klein was handed off from the tall/short pair to a large white woman, this one dressed in police togs, but without a gun, club or radio. She led him into a square brown room where he was given bright orange pants and shirt. An ununiformed man watched as Klein took off his wool slacks, cashmere sweater and monogrammed silk boxers, recently gifted to him by his wife. His fear of being strip searched proved unwarranted; California had stopped doing that to non-violent arrestees years before. Fingerprinting and mug shots followed. He considered asking for a comb but thought better of it, running his fingers through his ample head of gray hair. He assumed that his picture would end up in and on the local media. He wanted to look innocent. He did not smile.
At some point in the process, he said to his handler, “My attorney, Irving Greenberg, is supposed to meet me here.” His assumption was that everybodysev at the jail knew and feared Greenberg. The lady did not respond, verbally or non-verbally. Either she didn’t hear or didn’t care. He dropped it, presuming that Greenberg was on the other side of the walls getting things taken care of. He would be out of jail very soon.
Klein’s guide marched him, now without cuffs, through heavy metal doors which she opened with a code – no jangling keys - to the holding cell. Another heavy steel door was the only entrance into the brick-walled room. In spite of the sparse assemblage of arrestees in the outer sanctum, this cell was packed. A good estimator of crowd size, Fred calculated there were 45 men in a space that could not have exceeded 25 by 15 feet. The periphery of three sides of the cell had tightly anchored steel benches that accommodated about half of the inmates. The rest stood or sat on the floor. He had no reasonable option but to join the floor-sitters. Holding cells were not created with the comfort of their inhabitants in mind.
Of the five senses, four – all but taste - were stimulated in their anatomically specific areas of Klein’s brain. He saw that he had joined a temporary brotherhood of men – he was almost certainly the oldest. Gray hair was rare - his was the grayest. Most of his colleagues were young, teens and twenties. Latinos and blacks made up the distinct majority. Asians and scruffy Anglos more or less equally divided the remainder. Except for the Asians, most everybody else was bearded or in need of a shave. He heard very little; he was amazed by the fact that so many men could make so little noise. What verbal interaction he heard was mainly Spanish. Klein had once rated himself fluent in the language, thanks to college and travel, but here he understood very little. He felt enough bodies to make him uncomfortable. With so little space in the cell, movement was like that of an emptying, sold-out sports arena – one couldn’t help bumping into others. Fearing violent reactions of his neighbors, he moved as little as possible. The sense most negatively abused was smell. The place stank. Obviously, no one had showered since getting incarcerated and, for most everybody, it had been some time before arrest that they last saw a shower or bath. Moreover, the two stainless s
teel toilets in the room had obviously not been cleaned for many days. Klein knew that he would accustom himself to the odors of the place, but that didn’t make his initial minutes and hours any more tolerable.
An hour into his stay, he was approached from across the cell by a man who he assumed was the second oldest guy in the place – maybe 65 or a few years more. He was Asian, probably Chinese, but maybe Korean. His hair was black; chemicals had to have played a role in that. “What are you doing in this shithole?” the man asked, accentless and in a low enough voice to be inaudible to their fellow inmates.
“They say I hit someone with my car and left the scene.”
“You weren’t the guy who hit the woman on California Street that I heard about on the news, were you?”
“That’s me.”
“Jesus, you’re in trouble.”
“I’ve got a good lawyer. Why are you here?”
“White collar stuff. I’m being charged with taking money from the bank where I work. I did it but it was only about two thousand dollars. For my daughter-in-law. She’s got cancer and they’ve got no insurance. But I’ve got a good lawyer too – name of Greenberg – always get a Jewish one when you’re in big trouble.”
“You mean Irving Greenberg? He’s mine.”
“That’s him. Looks like we got something in common. He was supposed to get me out of here by noon.”
“He told me to meet him here at 11:45. That must have been because he knew he needed to be here for you. He said he had another client to see here. But the cops came and got me first.”
Time passed slowly. Klein did get accustomed to the smell, but he did everything in his power to resist his need to use the toilet for defecation. He had no desire to sit in the middle of a bunch of felons while he took a crap. Many of his mates had no such hesitation.