The Brea File

by Louis Charbonneau

  “For God’s sake, why?”

  “He wanted it to happen,” Collins answered quietly. “He made it happen.”

  * * * *

  The time was three hours later in Washington, D.C., than in San Timoteo, California, and in a gracious southern colonial house in Chevy Chase, Maryland, Erika Halbig warmed a Waterford brandy glass between her hands. She was reclining on the cut-velvet gold chaise in the big upstairs bedroom, wearing an almost transparent nightgown that clung softly to her full breasts and long, smooth thighs. When Russell Halbig entered the room he glanced at the glass in her hands but made no comment. Erika watched with detached interest as he undressed, retired to the bathroom, where she could hear the Waterpik growling, then reappeared. The brandy—her third of the evening—had its usual effect of making her less tense, enabling her to feel a little detached.

  Halbig had come home late, then spent much of the evening in his study. During one period he had talked for a long time to a United States senator. Not that he had told her of the call. Erika knew because the maid, Alma, had answered the phone in the hall and, after Halbig took it in his study, whispered the name of the caller to Erika.

  “Anything interesting happen today?” Erika asked him now, watching as he did his exercises beside his bed. They had had twin beds since the first year.

  “The usual,” Halbig said, grunting as he did sit-ups with his feet hooked under the bed frame.

  The usual, she repeated to herself. What was usual? How was she supposed to know when he never talked to her of the usual or the unusual? “What did Senator Sederholm want with you?”

  Halbig halted in the middle of a sit-up exercise, his hands locked behind his head. His head really was too small for him, she thought. “Alma told you?”

  “Yes, wasn’t she supposed to?”

  Halbig did not reply to that. Instead he said, “The senator just won a big primary election in California yesterday. I congratulated him.”

  Erika nodded, as if he had answered her question. She wondered when she had first begun to accept his responses as if they were real answers. “Will you be inviting him to the house?”

  Halbig finished his exercises. He was not breathing hard. He didn’t even breathe hard after sex, she reminded herself. As if it were just another form of exercise. Climbing into bed and turning off the light on the nightstand beside it, leaving her in a pool of light on her side of the room, Halbig said, “I don’t know about that, but I did invite some guests for this Saturday night.”

  “Who?”

  “The Macimers—you remember Paul and Jan. And Gordon and Mary Ruhle.”

  Erika Halbig felt an odd fluttering of her heart, a moment’s breathlessness. She put down her empty brandy glass on the small fruitwood table beside the chaise. She did it very carefully, pleased that her hand was steady. “Whatever for?” she asked. “What made you invite them?”

  Halbig turned over in his bed, settling himself with his back toward her and the light. “I have my reasons,” he said, in a tone that made it quite plain she was not to ask what they were. “Besides,” he added, “they’re old friends.”

  “I really don’t understand this sudden interest in old friends,” Jan Macimer said.

  “Gordon, Russ and I haven’t been in the same place very often in recent years. I guess Halbig thought we ought to make a stab at old acquaintance.”

  “Mmmm.” Jan skimmed through another of the examinations she had brought home with her from the final class of the semester. She would read thoroughly and grade them later. For now she wanted first impressions, a sense of how much had been learned, how much was still to be done. Idly she asked, “How long has Gordon been at Quantico?”

  “A couple of weeks, it turns out. He came in as a special instructor for the Anti-Terrorist Task Force. A volunteer,” Paul Macimer added. “You know how gung ho Gordon always was.”

  “Yes,” Jan said dryly. “Have you talked to him?”

  Paul shook his head. “I’ll see him tomorrow and surprise the old bastard.” He would also be seeing Timothy Callahan, but Macimer did not mention this. In a late-afternoon call Russ Halbig had suggested that Macimer drive down to Quantico in the morning. “Why Callahan?” Macimer had asked curiously. “Have you forgotten, Paul? He was Landers’ number two on the PRC Task Force. He knows that case as well as anyone alive. The Director thought you should talk to him. Callahan also knew Lippert well—was once quite close to him. They worked together, I believe.”

  Halbig knew perfectly well, Macimer thought, exactly when and for how long Callahan and Lippert had worked together.

  Jan put her students’ exam papers aside, satisfied with the first run-through. Better than she had feared, not quite as good overall as she had hoped. But some of the gains in the class, she felt, were intangible, such as increased self-confidence and improved self-images, benefits that wouldn’t necessarily show up in a written test.

  “Was tonight the last class?” Paul asked suddenly.

  Jan looked up with a smile. “It was. You get a B-plus for remembering. A little late, maybe, but…”

  “I meant to ask you earlier,” he said lamely. “I hadn’t really forgotten.” There was a moment’s awkwardness, a silence that left room for Jan’s unspoken thought that he did not regard her class as very important. He said, as if reading her thought, “You’re wrong, I do care. How did it go? How do the exams look?”

  “Pretty good. I’ll know better tomorrow.”

  They went upstairs together. While they were undressing, Jan said, “Paul… I’m worried about Linda.”

  “What’s wrong with Linda?”

  “You know perfectly well. You haven’t been that remote from your family these past few weeks, though it seems like it.”

  “I know she was upset over the robbery—”

  “Upset! Paul, she isn’t only upset. It goes a lot deeper than that. I think she should talk to someone.”

  “Like who? You mean a doctor?”

  “I mean an analyst.”

  “A shrink? Are you kidding?”

  “There’s nothing funny about it.”

  Macimer frowned. He had a reflex reaction against the notion of his daughter seeing a psychiatrist. He knew it was an old-fashioned response—hell, he was quick enough to call on the insights of a criminal psychologist when a case called for it. But that was different….

  “Do you really think it’s that serious?”

  “I think you ought to have a talk with her for a start. Maybe that would help.”

  “All right, I will.”

  He went to the window and stood in his pajama bottoms staring out at the soft rain, which created a mist like fog around streetlights and muffled the sounds of distant traffic. In that distance an ambulance wailed, the cry bodiless and remote like the anguish of a lost soul. Behind him, from the bed, Jan said, “There’s something else. Paul… is there any reason someone from the Bureau would follow me? Or why anyone else would, for that matter?”

  Macimer turned to stare at her. “What makes you ask that?”

  “Carole thought a man followed us from the restaurant last night.” She gave a brief account of the evening, concluding with Carole’s description of the stranger who had reacted so sharply to Jan’s entrance and had later followed them when they left the restaurant.

  “Sounds to me as if you picked up an admirer.”

  “I didn’t pick him up and he apparently didn’t want to have anything to do with me,” she said dryly. She had not mentioned the man in the gray suit. “Would you tell me if you knew why someone might follow me?”

  He hesitated a moment too long. “Of course. Unless it was better for you not to know.”

  “And I don’t get to decide what’s best for me, right?”

  “Jan, honey, I didn’t say that. I don’t know anything about anyone following you. There’s no reason for it.”

  “Well, something odd is going on. Our house is invaded, our daughter is terrorized, I’m followed
by a stranger—”

  “We don’t know you were even followed. That’s Carole’s vivid imagination.”

  “She didn’t make him up!” Jan snapped.

  “How can you be sure?”

  “How can I be sure of anything? Paul—is this family in some kind of danger? What about the children?”

  “No.”

  “How can I believe that? I’m not sure you’d tell me.”

  “Why should you believe me? Nobody believes the FBI anymore, right?”

  “You said it, not me. Anyway, I’m not talking about the FBI. I’m talking about you and me and our children.”

  “And the FBI.”

  “If you say so.”

  As always when they argued, the tension in the room was palpable, so charged you would expect it to explode if either of them struck a match. But Macimer sensed something different about this sudden clash. Jan was further from him. They were not simply a man and a woman suddenly lashing out. They were shouting across a chasm wider than he had known was there.

  Crawling into bed and turning off the lights, Macimer told himself something he had been reluctant to accept for a long time: the problem between them went deeper than momentary angers.

  He could feel the warmth of her body beside him, smell the familiar scent. As if aware of his response, she turned away slightly, a small but meaningful gesture. “I had a letter from Mom today,” she said quietly. “They want to know if we’re coming out to Arizona. We said we might come as soon as the school year was out.”

  “I won’t be able to get away just now.” Paul thought of the man in the restaurant and of Carole Baumgartner’s acute perceptions, which he took more seriously than he had let on. Jan’s parents had moved to Sun City outside of Phoenix after her father retired. It was a long way from Washington. Sunny and safe. “Maybe you and the kids should go.”

  “You mean it might be a good idea if we were separated for a while?”

  “I didn’t mean that at all. And I don’t think it.”

  “I do,” Jan said. “I think it might be a good idea for both of us.”

  10

  By Wednesday morning the skies had cleared. The air was hot and humid as only Washington can be in June. After a review of general cases under investigation by the WFO, which Macimer had turned over to Jerry Russell, the ASAC, and a quick glance at the first reports in from the agents in California on the Brea case, Macimer left the Washington Field Office and drove across the Rochambeau Bridge. He had a glimpse of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial off to his right, serene and white and classical. Then he swung onto the Washington Memorial Parkway heading south.

  As Macimer left Alexandria behind and drove on through the rolling Virginia countryside, his thoughts soon drifted far from the current tangle of WFO cases and came to rest on another hot and humid morning, in the Blue Goose Cafe in downtown Omaha, when Gordon Ruhle told him that he was volunteering for transfer to the newly created field office in Jackson, Mississippi.

  Omaha had been Macimer’s first office assignment after graduation from the FBI Academy. After two months of tedious file searches and employee background checks, Macimer had been assigned to the Resident Agent’s office in York, where Gordon Ruhle was the Senior Agent.

  It was the kind of town where, in the perspective of each year, the county fair stood out as an exciting event. Everyone in town knew the FBI men and respected them. There was an easy camaraderie with the local sheriff and his deputies—every Friday morning they held an informal “law enforcement breakfast” at the Pancake House, ostensibly to discuss mutual problems but actually to socialize.

  Most of the cases involved auto thieves, parole violators, deserters or Selective Service defaulters. Macimer reported to a criminal squad in the Omaha Field Office. An RA was, in fact, simply an extension of the parent field office, and supposedly Macimer’s assignments were those that came from the parent squad through his field supervisor in Omaha. In practice, Gordon Ruhle, as the Senior Resident Agent, operated a very loose ship in the York office. Everyone worked on any case that came up. Even though most of them were routine and unexciting, it was an ideal way for a first office agent to break in. In a larger office, as Macimer would later learn, he might have spent most of his first year or more doing nothing but humdrum applicant work—interviewing neighbors and friends, checking school and credit records, running name checks through the Bureau’s criminal and security files. The kind of work older agents near retirement were often glad enough to settle into, since it involved no risks of rocking the boat or in any way jeopardizing what they had worked a whole career for.

  Eventually, during a flap over suspected sabotage at the home of the Strategic Air Command outside Omaha, both Gordon Ruhle and Macimer were called back into the Omaha office. They were both working on the espionage squad in Omaha when the call came from FBI Headquarters for volunteers to go to Mississippi, in the summer of 1964.

  That morning in the Blue Goose Cafe in Omaha when Ruhle made his announcement, there was never a moment’s doubt in Paul Macimer’s mind that he would also volunteer for the Jackson assignment.

  Puzzled that Gordon Ruhle would be eager to protect civil rights workers drawn to the South by the Movement, Macimer soon understood that Gordon’s views had not changed. Ruhle had little sympathy for liberal activists, but he was an FBI man through and through. He had sworn to uphold and enforce the laws of the land. If that meant protecting long-haired northern radicals in jeans and T-shirts from the hatred and violence of southern rednecks and Klan terrorists—for whom Ruhle had no more use than he did for New York Jewish liberals, Communists or militant blacks—then he would protect them. Or find their murderers.

  When Macimer expressed surprise that Russ Halbig would volunteer for dangerous duty in Mississippi, Gordon Ruhle shook his head. “No surprise,” he said with a cynical grin. “The Old Man is gonna be watching what we do down there. Halbig knows that. He could work ten years in Omaha without ever being noticed.”

  In the hue and cry following the murder of three civil rights activists earlier that summer, J. Edgar Hoover gave a veteran agent, Roy K. Moore, five days to have a new field office open for business in Jackson, to serve as headquarters for the Bureau’s greatly expanded effort to find the killers and to prevent further violence. Moore was not exactly your typical SAC, although he had Hoover’s confidence. He was flamboyant, action-oriented, a man who got things done and would overlook departures from the FBI Manual if they brought results. Gordon Ruhle loved him.

  Moore set up the Jackson office in July of 1964 at the height of that summer’s voter registration drives and in an atmosphere of hostility and threatened violence. Macimer, Ruhle and Halbig arrived in August. Two nights later Macimer was crouching behind a hedge bordering the dirt lot of a Negro church when a shotgun blast neatly decapitated the hedge. It was his first real taste of being under fire.

  The agents had plenty of action over the next two years, shepherding youthful activists from the North and trying to protect those blacks who were bold enough to provide the outsiders shelter, sympathy and a reason for being there. Jackson itself was not what the agents called hazardous duty. The Mississippi power structure kept things under control in the larger and more prosperous cities. Danger waited back in the woods, on the remote farms and in the small rural towns. Macimer and Ruhle spent nights in a mosquito-ridden swamp on a stakeout, crawled under a grocery store to defuse a ticking bomb, had the tires of their moving car shot up. From Ruhle, Macimer learned how to ferret out and use informants, who generally acted less from altruism or moral conviction than the need of money. Russ Halbig, true to form, became useful to the beleaguered Moore as a liaison between the SAC and the hundreds of reporters who were underfoot, for the Jackson office had become the information center for the civil rights struggle in Mississippi.

  In the summer of 1966 a young man named Ira Rothleder came to Mississippi from New York, where he had worked in a settlement house. He was accompanied by his w
ife Maureen, a pretty, sunny-natured Irish girl who had a special way with children. The young couple opened a child-care center and library, stocked with books they had brought with them in cardboard boxes in their overladen VW bus. Maureen began luring children and their mothers to the center while Ira joined other activists in that summer’s voter registration drive.

  On a hot evening late in July, the Rothleders and a seventeen-year-old black girl from Hattiesburg who was helping out at the center were busy unpacking boxes of newly arrived used books. Without warning fire bombs crashed through two front windows and exploded. In panic the three young people tried to escape through the back door of the small frame building. Another bomb turned the narrow back hallway into an inferno. There was no way out of the burning building except the front door.

  Outside, parked in the street with the motor of their pickup truck running, four men waited, at least three of them armed with rifles or shotguns. Rothleder, the first one through the door, was struck down by two rifle bullets in the chest. He died almost instantly. A shotgun blast nearly cut the slim young black girl, Cynthia Watson, in half. The last rifle shot, as the pickup roared away, struck Maureen Rothleder in the jaw. She would survive the fire, the rain of gunfire and a series of operations over the next six months to rebuild her shattered face.

  Paul Macimer and Gordon Ruhle were among nearly a hundred agents who worked on the case over the next six weeks. The pickup truck was found two days later parked on a street in Greenville. It had been stolen in Jackson twenty-four hours before. Although a score of FBI lab technicians sifted the cab and bed of the truck for every hair, fiber and smear of dirt from a muddy boot, no evidence was found that would identify the four men who had waited outside the Rothleders’ child-care center for the flames to drive their victims toward them.

  What seemed a promising lead developed through one of Macimer’s informants, who claimed to know the identity of the driver of the pickup truck involved in the killings. The driver was a nineteen-year-old who had been present that night to prove his worth as a new member of the local klavern of the Ku Klux Klan. According to his story, he had not been armed. Because he was the only one involved who hadn’t fired one of the murder weapons, he was not trusted by the other three attackers. He was afraid for his life.