The Brea File

by Louis Charbonneau

  “You never mentioned that one.”

  “I was going to, but when I looked for him after we sat down he was gone.”

  “What did he look like?” Jan asked curiously.

  “Well… it was dark off in that corner, especially when we first came in from outside. All I can tell you is he was solid, square—you know, an FBI type. All wrong for the beautiful blonde he was with.”

  “Beautiful blonde? Oh, for heaven’s sake, Carole—”

  “But he did just about lose his teeth when he saw you,” Carole insisted. “The blonde was one of the things that made me notice his reaction—no offense, dear, but she made Miss America look tacky. So why did he have a roving eye?”

  Jan smiled. “Maybe you were the one who caught his eye, not me.”

  “I don’t think so.” Carole was silent for a few moments, then said reflectively, “He looked familiar, you know? Like somebody I should have known. Maybe that’s it, maybe he’s someone notable. Anyway, he sure got out of there in a hurry. But…”

  Jan had a sudden intuition that caused her to look again into the mirror at the road behind them. “Did you think he was following us?”

  Carole gave a quick little laugh. “Okay, so I’m being paranoid, but I did think the same guy was watching us from a car in the parking lot when we left. And he pulled out right behind us.”

  Without knowing exactly why, Jan felt a chill at the nape of her neck. “There’s no one there now.”

  “I know, I know. I guess it was my imagination.” After a moment’s consideration Carole shrugged, a self-deprecatory gesture. “He was probably one of the shy ones. God save us from the ones who hide behind trees!”

  Jan dropped Carole Baumgartner off at her condo, declined an invitation to come in for coffee and drove on home. Alone with her thoughts, she found herself wondering about the man in the bar who had left so hastily.

  Once again Jan felt an unmistakable chill. As she turned off the highway onto Long Valley Road, she glanced into the rearview mirror, saw no one following her and suddenly remembered Paul doing the same thing the night of the robbery.

  9

  By seven o’clock Wednesday morning, when the first agents began to arrive, the special squad room had been set up for the task force assigned to the Brea investigation. Desks had been borrowed or requisitioned from other units and even from an office of the GSA which was in the same building.

  The file that would rapidly grow to a thick volume on the Brea investigation was thin that first morning. There was one new item of interest: a Nitel from Agents Collins and Garvey. The two men had been routed to Sacramento by way of San Francisco, where according to the night teletype report, they had been met by Agent Charles Reese of the San Francisco Field Office. They had talked at length to Reese about Walter Schumaker, whom Reese had originally recruited as an informant. Reese’s former partner, Victor Pryor, who was now working in private security for a Bay Area electronics firm, was presently attending a security conference in Chicago, staying at the Chicago Hilton.

  Reese had added little that was not already known. Vernon Lippert had requested a copy of the tape recording of Walter Schumaker’s voice back in January. That was the first Reese had learned of what had been an extensive search by Lippert into the records of informants—always kept in special indices—run out of the San Francisco office. Reese had been curious about Lippert’s inquiries, but not enough to sustain his interest after Lippert’s death. He knew of no reason for Lippert to be interested in Schumaker, who had dropped out of sight about three years ago after being dropped from the FBI’s payroll. “He didn’t give us anything worth paying for,” Reese had said.

  Macimer called Harrison Stearns into his office. The young agent would be copying, filing and forwarding the field reports as they came in. “I want to know where Collins and Garvey are staying as soon as we hear,” Macimer said. “And inform them I want telephonic reports of anything important in addition to the teletypes. Give them my home phone number. With the time difference, they might have to reach me there at night.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And send Rodriguez in here.”

  William Rodriguez had been pulled from an undercover assignment in New York—the kind of work J. Edgar Hoover had disapproved of for his agents, but which in recent years had proven to be indispensable for investigations into white collar and organized crime, government corruption and terrorist activities. Rodriguez was stocky, round-faced, with thick glossy black hair that came almost to his shoulders and a bandido mustache that drooped on either side of his mouth. He had not slept, arriving from New York on an early-morning flight, and he still wore his street clothes from the Puerto Rican barrio—jeans and a T-shirt that carried a printed message: “I’m Gonna Be a Poppa.”

  “Is that true?” Macimer asked with a grin.

  “I hope not,” Rodriguez said. “I’m not married.”

  He spoke without an accent. Rodriguez was American-born of Mexican parents, his father having been an illegal alien who found work in Texas. The agent spoke fluent Spanish, but he also had a good ear and was adept at accents, enabling him to blend easily into different Latin communities. He could pass for a Chicano in Los Angeles, a Puerto Rican in New York or a Cuban in Miami.

  Macimer told him about the robbery at his house and described the three Hispanics who had taken part. “Your job is to find them. You’ll have a partner. Have you worked with Jo Singleton before?”

  Rodriguez shrugged. “She’s okay.” White teeth flashed in a grin. “She’s got a lousy accent, that’s all.”

  “Then you’ll have to cover for her.”

  “You got any drawings of those robbers?”

  Macimer removed some photocopies from a folder. Rodriguez studied them briefly, then slipped them into his own vinyl briefcase.

  “Anything from the lab yet on those sheets you sent over?”

  “Not yet—I’ll let you know as soon as we have anything.”

  Rodriguez was brash, cocky, but Macimer wasn’t ready to complain if the cockiness was deserved. That remained to be seen. For now, Rodriguez could follow up on Garvey’s name search. It wasn’t much to hang an investigation on, Macimer thought as the agent left, but there wasn’t much else.

  He wondered if Collins and Garvey were in San Timoteo and what they were learning. If anything were to be discovered that would fill in the missing pieces of Vernon Lippert’s mysterious file, it would probably be found in Lippert’s own territory.

  * * * *

  “Yes, sir!” Harold Whittaker said enthusiastically. “Vern Lippert used to come in here regular as clockwork. Used to sit right there in that chair you’re sitting in, Mr. Collins, sir. We worked fine together—none of that stuff you hear about where the police and the FBI are stepping on each other’s corns, you know? You’ll find we’re happy to cooperate with you folks.”

  Collins refrained from reminding the San Timoteo police chief that, at the big moment of his law enforcement life, he had failed to call the resident FBI agent when he went out with his men to surround the People’s Revolutionary Committee in their hideout. Apparently close cooperation had its limits. “I’m glad to hear that, Chief Whittaker. What we’re most interested in right now is why Lippert was digging into that disaster after all this time. Did he talk to you about it?”

  The police chief shifted his bulk in his chair. He was in his shirt sleeves. The office in a yellow brick building on Main Street in downtown San Timoteo was cooled by one of those big wooden ceiling fans that reminded Collins of an old Sidney Greenstreet-Peter Loire movie. Outside, at nine-thirty in the morning, it was already hot. Collins didn’t mind heat when he was working. He found that it tended to distress the people he was dealing with more than it did him.

  “Vern had a bug up his… in his ear,” Whittaker amended. “No getting away from that. If you want my opinion, Mr. Collins, sir, I think it was, you know, kind of an obsession with him, what happened to the PRC that day. He was there
, you know.”

  The comment was condescending but Collins gave no sign. It had taken the burly police chief a while to get over the shock of having a black FBI agent walk into his office, Collins thought. He said, “You were there, too, weren’t you, Chief?”

  “That’s right! Yes, sir, that’s true. You’d have seen that in your reports, I reckon. Mr. Collins, that affair was over and done with a long time ago. It was investigated every which way, but Vern couldn’t let go of it, like a dog worrying a bone.”

  “You don’t think he had learned anything new about what happened?”

  “What was there to learn? Hell, Mr. Collins—beggin’ your pardon, sir—thirty million people seen the whole thing on the TV. If there was anything left to be dug up that we didn’t find, or the FBI didn’t find, you can be sure those reporters would’ve dug it up. We had reporters upstairs and downstairs here, sir, hundreds of ‘em, for weeks after the dust settled. Seemed like we had a reporter for every single citizen of San Timoteo. I doubt there’s anybody in this town wasn’t interviewed about what he had for breakfast that day, much less what he might have seen.”

  “But Lippert had been asking some of those questions again, hadn’t he? Recently, I mean—just before he died?”

  “Well… yes, sir, I believe he was.”

  “Like who fired the first shot that triggered what happened?”

  Harold Whittaker scowled. It was a question he had been asked too many times. Collins watched the chief struggle to control his exasperation. “That shot come from the house, Mr. Collins, sir. My men didn’t shoot until they were shot at. They had their orders, and they knew I’d of had any man’s badge that fired his weapon without provocation. You’ll excuse me, sir, but I’ve been asked that question a thousand times and the answer’s still the same. We didn’t go in there like it was the O.K. Corral. We surrounded that house and I ordered those terrorists to come out. The answer was a gunshot, and that’s the way it happened.”

  “A rifle shot, Chief Whittaker?”

  The police chief looked startled. “Well… yes, sir, I’d say it was a rifle shot. Can’t swear to that now, after so long, but you get to know the difference without thinking about it. Rifle gives you a kind of slam instead of the pop you get with a handgun.”

  Collins nodded, making brief notes as Whittaker watched. “Thanks a lot, Chief. You don’t mind if I talk to some of the officers who were there, the ones Vernon Lippert questioned? I want to know what Lippert was looking for exactly.”

  Whittaker had another struggle with himself. Collins regarded him impassively. San Timoteo’s burly police chief had been visibly surprised when Collins entered his office, but Whittaker possessed the small-town lawman’s respect for—even awe of—the Federal Bureau of Investigation. After covering his initial reaction, Whittaker had been “sir-ing” Collins to an embarrassing degree. Once again, that respect won out.

  “You go right ahead, Mr. Collins, sir. Like I said, we’ve always cooperated fully with your people. We were sorry to have the local FBI office shut down here after Mr. Lippert passed away, and that’s a fact. People hereabouts liked knowing there was a government agent just down the street, someone they knew. You talk to my men, Mr. Collins, but it won’t change anything in the record.”

  “It’s routine, Chief Whittaker. We’re simply trying to find out what Agent Lippert was digging into those last few months before he died.” Collins paused. “Were you particularly surprised by his accident?”

  Whittaker frowned. He swung around in his chair to stare through the window toward the tiny park across the street. In the still, hot air two old men sat motionless on a green bench, and an old VW without a lid over its exposed rear engine drove by with a deep-throated growl.

  “Surprised? Now that’s an interesting question, Mr. Collins, sir. Yes, sir, that’s one question nobody asked me before. Fact is, I was surprised. I been fishin’ with Vern Lippert up at Lake Hieronimo. He knew that lake, he knew how to handle a boat and he could swim. But the coroner’s report up there made it plain. Vern drowned, that’s all.”

  “No bruises, nothing unexplained?”

  “Only one thing,” Harold Whittaker said. “How a man like Vernon Lippert could have let it happen.”

  * * * *

  Late that afternoon, after losing a flip of a coin with Collins, Pat Garvey drove the forty miles from San Timoteo to the FBI’s field office in Sacramento. There he visited the secure cable room and telexed copies of the two agents’ reports for their first day of work on the Brea case.

  When he got back to the motel on the outskirts of San Timoteo he and Collins went out to dinner. They ate at a Sambo’s Restaurant. “This okay with you?” Garvey asked.

  “As long as they got pancakes,” said Collins.

  They slid into a booth, ordered hamburgers instead of pancakes and looked out the windows at the quiet main street. “Lively little town,” Collins observed. “Looks like Sambo’s is one of the real night spots.”

  Garvey glanced around the restaurant. The booths were crowded with young people in jeans and T-shirts and shaggy hair, older families with children, a few elderly couples. One baby was banging on its special high chair with a spoon. “It’s a nice town,” Garvey said. “Decent people, not much crime. I can understand why Vernon Lippert never wanted to leave here.”

  Collins stared at him. “It still has its one claim to fame. It blew up the whole People’s Revolutionary Committee.”

  Garvey shrugged. “Those nuts didn’t belong here. They came from outside.”

  “They had to be born somewhere.” Collins regarded his partner speculatively. He had not worked with Garvey before, although they had both been with the WFC the past two years. Although two years younger, Garvey was actually the senior agent of the two, having been with the Bureau a year longer than Collins. Collins hadn’t especially looked forward to the pairing. Not that there was anything wrong with Garvey—or maybe that was the problem in itself. He sometimes seemed a little too good to be true. A little too wide-eyed, Collins thought. Maybe that was it. He envied Garvey his innocence. He said, “You really like this place? You’d like to end up in an RA’s office someplace like this? In Sleepy Town?”

  “Yes,” Garvey said, nodding at first tentatively, then more emphatically. “Wouldn’t you?”

  Collins thought of the scene in the park outside the police station that morning, the two old men sitting on the bench, dazed in the sun, the desultory traffic along the main street, the lone fly buzzing against Chief Whittaker’s window. “I like a little more action,” Collins said.

  They walked back to their motel after dinner. They carried cold soft-drink cans from a dispensing machine to their room, where they relaxed in wood-and-leather Mexican chairs more comfortable than they appeared. Collins described his interview with Chief Harold Whittaker and several members of the San Timoteo police department. “One of them, Forbes-he’s a sergeant—was in charge of the detail behind the house on Dover Street that night. He insists none of his men fired the first shot. And everyone seems to agree that it didn’t come from out front.” Collins reviewed the ground he had covered during the day. “You could say they’re all covering for themselves, but I don’t think so. Forbes swears the shot never came from any of his men behind the house. He heard it, but couldn’t say where it came from.”

  “And that’s what Lippert kept asking?”

  “The same questions, nothing new. How about you? You come up with anything?”

  Garvey shook his head. “I hit every house in the 1200 block and the 1300 block, where the hideout was. I’ve got a half-dozen places to go back to where nobody was home or there’s someone else who was there back in ‘81. The best witness is the one we already knew about, Mrs. Torgeson. She lives right across the street from where the PRC hideout was. She saw the whole thing from an upstairs window.”

  “The nosy woman?”

  Garvey nodded. “There’s one on every street. The kind who knows when everyone co
mes and goes. The one who’s always looking out from behind a curtain. Mrs. Torgeson had her eye on that house especially because of all the young people who’d moved in.” Garvey smiled. “She thought there were some funny goings-on, all those young people in one house, and she didn’t approve. She figured maybe it was one of those communes she’d read about. She has arthritis—she has one of those metal hip sockets that enables her to walk, but she doesn’t get around well. So she spends a lot of time at her window, looking out.”

  “She saw Schumaker leave the house on the twenty-seventh?”

  “She saw a man go out that morning, and the description fits Schumaker. He came back with groceries about noon.” Garvey shook his head. “You won’t change that woman’s story. It made a celebrity out of her, she was interviewed so many times, even on television. But the story holds up.”

  “She’s absolutely sure no one left the house all day on the twenty-eighth? How can she be so sure?”

  “She says she was home all that day, and my guess is she spent the whole time close to that window. That neighborhood is far enough away from any shops that a stranger couldn’t have walked far without being noticed. If anyone had gone in or out, they’d have used a car… and no one did.”

  Collins looked at him steadily. “You know what that means, don’t you?”

  Garvey wore his intent, serious expression, the blue eyes curious under heavy black eyebrows. “I’m not sure…”

  Collins asked himself, not for the first time, how he had got teamed up with this Ail-American. He said, “It means that when Schumaker was out getting groceries on the twenty-seventh he made that call to Brea in Sacramento asking for help. And if he didn’t leave the house the next day, it means he couldn’t have made the call to the police, the one that tipped them off and sent them charging out to the house on Dover Street.”

  Garvey was silent, staring at his partner.

  “Brea,” Collins said softly. “He was the only one on the outside who knew the PRC was holed up in that house. So he’s the only one who could have tipped off the fuzz.”