The Brea File

by Louis Charbonneau

  Macimer was glad enough when the food came. He realized that he had overstepped his usual limit of three drinks. He had lost count, in fact, but he thought he was up to five.

  He was also glad when Erika Halbig went into the house and changed out of her skintight bathing suit.

  * * * *

  It was a busy Saturday night at Farrantino’s Restaurant in Arlington, across the Potomac southwest of the nation’s capital. Three young black men handled the valet parking, and they were kept on the run all evening. When the clean-cut young man tried to stop Allen Brown to ask a question, Brown cut him off. “Hey, man, I got no time, you know?”

  He jumped into a Seville after handing its owner a claim check and wheeled off into the darkness with a squeal of rubber. But when Brown came back to the restaurant’s entry he found the same sandy-haired dude waiting for him. This time the dude flashed a gold badge. Brown took a second look and choked off a smart remark. What the hell—he hadn’t sniffed any grass for over a week. And he wasn’t dealing. What could the FBI want with him? “What is it, man?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Just a couple of questions,” the FBI man said. “Have you had any problems with theft out of the cars at night? Somebody stealing things, or even taking stereos and hubcaps?”

  “Hey, you jiving me? We get hit that way two, three times a week! Hey, where were you last night? We had one Mercedes cleaned out while the dude was inside eating. You should’ve heard him scream! But listen, we got a sign right there, you dig it? ‘We Are Not Responsible for Personal Articles Left in Vehicles.’ Hey, we can’t guard ‘em, you know? We just park ‘em.”

  Harrison Stearns grabbed the young man’s arm in his eagerness. “I want to know everything you remember about that Mercedes. What time did it come in? How long was it parked?”

  “Hey, man, we’re busy! This is Saturday night.” The young black attendant pulled against Stearns’s tight grip. “You costin’ me money.”

  Stearns caught himself, eased his hold on the youth’s arm but did not release him. “You must take a break sometime. When?”

  “Yeah, yeah… maybe about ten o’clock. It eases off.”

  “I’ll be waiting,” the FBI man said firmly.

  * * * *

  Darkness. The smell of charcoal and seared meat still hung in the air. The plates with their leftovers had been whisked away by the silent, efficient Alma. The evening air held a soft blue haze like smoke from a thousand barbecue fires.

  From a group of chaises near one corner of the pool came the murmur of women’s voices. The artificial blue glow of the backlit water reflected from the women’s hair like a blue rinse.

  Macimer sat in a corner of the terrace with Gordon Ruhle and Russ Halbig. Ruhle lit a large, fat-bowled briar pipe and puffed the tobacco mixture into a red glow. He still smoked the same cherry blend he had used twenty years ago, Macimer noted with amusement. Gordon the Traditionalist.

  “Hell, you could almost think nothing had changed,” Ruhle said, staring off into the darkness. “Is Ike still President?”

  Macimer said, “He’s gone but some things don’t change. Family, friends…”

  Ruhle blew out an angry cloud of smoke. “Bull. Don’t kid yourself. It looks the same on a night like this, but that’s a whole different world out there from what it was when we all started out. A whole different world.”

  “Everything may not be all right with the world,” Macimer said lightly, “but God’s still in His heaven, and we’re still the Good Guys.”

  “I’m not so sure about either of those things anymore.” Ruhle glowered at Macimer through cherry-scented smoke.

  “You always did have a tendency to exaggerate things, Gordie,” Halbig said, chuckling diplomatically. Ruhle had always hated being called Gordie. “I seem to remember your insisting the Commies would have swallowed us up by 1980. It hasn’t happened.”

  “You think it won’t?”

  There was a momentary silence. Macimer heard the lilt of Erika Halbig’s laughter floating toward them from poolside. Erika seemed to be laughing a lot. He saw her face catch the light from the pool as she turned toward him, as if she were staring directly at him. Jan’s face was in shadow.

  Gordon Ruhle’s words took him back twenty years. Gordon’s suspicion and hatred of Communists had not seemed exaggerated then. The Cold War was a reality to be dealt with, not a policy to be questioned. Even John Kennedy had reflected prevailing attitudes in his early confrontations with the Russians, who had done little to ease the tensions between the two great powers. As a new agent fresh out of law school, Macimer had quickly learned the importance J. Edgar Hoover placed on the Communist conspiracy, and he had been eager to do his part. He had had no reason to doubt Hoover’s estimate of the danger to the country posed by an aggressive Communist foe. And he had not questioned the polarized convictions of the tough, seasoned agent who had befriended him….

  “Your kids giving you any trouble, Paul?” Ruhle’s question jolted Macimer back to the present.

  He laughed. “Only the usual. My youngest boy wasn’t speaking to me for a while.” He gave a brief account of the robbery and its aftermath. “I’m afraid I didn’t come off like Superman.”

  “I think you handled it very well,” Russ Halbig said.

  Ruhle’s pipe had gone out. He tamped the tobacco down with a nailhead and struck another match. When he stopped puffing he said, “That’s exactly what I mean. Now we’ve got the punks invading our own houses, for Christ’s sake. And what happens if we catch ‘em? They go off laughing.”

  “What about your two? Ann and Gordon, Jr.?” Halbig asked Ruhle.

  “My kids…” Ruhle fell into a long, prickly silence. Finally he shrugged. “Why not? You might as well know.” For a moment longer he was silent. “When I was a kid nobody talked about cancer. If you had it in the family, you just didn’t talk about it out loud. In whispers, maybe, not looking anyone in the eye. Now… now it’s drugs and our kids. Yeah, both of mine are into that scene. Hell, they’re all into it. Why should my kids be any different?”

  The revelation was painful for Ruhle and it made Macimer uncomfortable. He suspected Chip had tried marijuana, at least. Given Chip’s age and the prevalence of grass in the high schools, it would have been surprising if he hadn’t. All-American jocks were not exactly shunning drugs. All-Pros were being picked up at airports with their pockets full of coke or heroin. And it was not only a drug scene. It was a fast-buck scene as well. That bothered Macimer more than the hunch that Chip and his pals used pot the way Paul and his friends had discovered booze a thousand years ago.

  “My kids are no better than the rest,” Ruhle was saying. “They didn’t have the guts to stand up for themselves and say no. Pot, speed, coke, PCP—you name it, they’re into it. And you can’t talk them out of it. You can’t tell them anything. If you try, they just clam up on you, or they look at you as if you’re coming at them out of the Middle Ages. Ask them if God’s still in His heaven, Paul—they don’t believe in anything but themselves. That’s what Mary and I raised—a couple of charter members of the Me generation.” Ruhle paused, suddenly reaching out to empty the ashes from his pipe into a glass ashtray, viciously banging the hot briar. The clatter caused the voices of the three women near the pool to fall silent, three faces to turn toward the men at the other end of the terrace. “Believe it or not,” Ruhle muttered in a lower voice, “I found out Gordon was dealing in uppers and downers at his school. When I learned that, I kicked him the hell out of the house. Then I found out Ann wasn’t living in her dormitory at college like she’d been telling us, she’d been sleeping with this fag teacher ten years older than she is. I haven’t talked to either of them since.”

  * * * *

  On the drive home Macimer told Jan that he had asked Gordon and Mary Ruhle over for dinner on Sunday. If she was surprised, Jan did not say so. Instead she began to supply him with more pieces of information about their old friends.

  “Did Gordon te
ll you about their kids? Gordon, Jr., and Ann?”

  “Yes. I gather he won’t even talk to them—doesn’t see them at all. That’s like Gordon, of course. How’s Mary taking it?”

  “Not very well. You know how she is—she’s very Catholic, very family-oriented. She does see them, of course, but she has to do it behind Gordon’s back, when he isn’t home. Which is a lot of the time, I gather.”

  “He’s on the road a lot,” Paul Macimer said. “He’s been on a national fugitive squad.”

  After a moment’s silence Jan said, “Erika drinks.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. She never stopped. I don’t know how she held it all without falling down. You didn’t notice?”

  “No… she seemed sober enough to me.”

  “It’s about the only thing about her you didn’t notice,” Jan said. “My God, that bathing suit, why did she even bother?”

  “The young have different standards these days. Fewer hangups, I guess they’d say.”

  “Thanks for reminding me,” Jan said, a little too sweetly. Macimer regretted his words, which seemed to say more than he had intended about Erika Halbig’s comparative youth. “Her standards seemed to appeal to you and Gordon. Talk about treating women as sex objects!”

  Macimer said nothing. The problem was not that they had treated women as sex objects, he thought ruefully. The trouble was they had reacted specifically to Erika Halbig as a sex object. An attention she hadn’t exactly resented.

  “She liked it, all right,” Jan said, as if reading his mind. “I wonder if that’s part of the trouble.”

  “What trouble?”

  She glanced at him in surprise. “Between her and Russ, of course. Honestly, Paul, for someone who’s supposed to be a trained observer you certainly can avoid seeing what you don’t want to notice.”

  “Obviously,” Macimer said, “I didn’t catch all the nuances you did.”

  “In all fairness, most of the little hints came during our girl talk, not when you men were around. Are you really surprised?”

  “I guess I’m not,” he said thoughtfully. “I remember I was stunned when he and Elaine broke up, but this time…” He shook his head. “Funny I didn’t catch any signs of trouble. I guess my mind was on… other things.”

  Jan looked at him directly for a moment. “These days,” she said, “it usually is.”

  * * * *

  Gordon Ruhle turned his rented Ford compact south on Connecticut Avenue and drove toward town. A moment later a battered vintage Volkswagen emerged from the same street onto Connecticut. Its lights came on only after it reached the main street.

  The VW lagged behind the Ford but kept it in sight through the center of the District and again as Gordon Ruhle crossed the Fourteenth Street Bridge and swung south on the parkway toward Alexandria. Though traffic was moderate, there was enough to screen the Volkswagen until the two cars passed Washington National Airport. As traffic thinned out south of the airport, the tailing car dropped further behind.

  Joseph Gerella abandoned his pursuit when the Ford swung into the parking lot of a Ramada Inn in Alexandria. He turned back toward town. He was not troubled by the possibility that the FBI agent in the rented car might have spotted him. Even if he had, Gerella reasoned, the agent could not have known who was following him.

  On his way home Gerella stopped off at a fast-food restaurant for a hamburger, fries and chocolate shake. He carried his tray to a booth by the window. As he ate he pondered the seemingly innocuous Saturday-night reunion he had witnessed at a distance. Paul Macimer had done nothing unusual in the week Gerella had been maintaining a discreet watch on the agent’s movements. Nor had the reporter learned anything significant from Jackie Macauley, an eager young female assistant on Senator Sederholm’s staff. Very eager. But the morning’s mail had brought another page from the missing FBI file, sent by the anonymous informant who had called Oliver Packard’s office asking for Gerella. By itself the page–containing a list of names, times, places in what looked to be a schedule of assignments—meant no more to Gerella than the original page he had received in the mail.

  But Macimer’s name was on that second page.

  Gerella lived in an apartment in an old building east of the Capitol, not far from Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium. It was an integrated neighborhood, but it was one he felt at home in. His only complaint was finding street parking for the Volkswagen; he had had to rent a garage two blocks from his building. By the time he had parked and locked the garage, it was after one o’clock in the morning. Walking along the deserted street, he told himself the night’s work might not have been fruitless. Perhaps there was some connection among the three agents that was worth exploring.

  Gerella had a habit of walking with his head down, absorbed in his thoughts. He did not notice anyone on the street until he was almost in front of his building. Then three figures materialized from the shadows. One stepped from behind a parked car. The other two emerged from behind the steps leading up to his apartment entrance.

  One of the men was a chunky figure about Gerella’s own size. The other two were youthfully slim, almost frail. Gerella was not deceived. He knew instantly he was in trouble.

  “Let’s cool it, huh?” he said quickly. “I’ve only got ten bucks on me—”

  The stocky man wasted no words. He moved in fast, feinting with something held in his right hand. A gun? Gerella wasn’t sure. He was angry now, and scared. A mugging to top off his Saturday night was just what he didn’t need. He tried to block an expected blow from the stocky man’s right hand. One of the other figures snaked behind him.

  Gerella broke for the steps to his building. He made it only as far as the bottom step.

  A foot jabbed between his legs, tripping him. As he fell forward he felt a glancing blow off a shoulder blade. The impact chilled his brain.

  He rolled and came up fighting. Gerella had had more than his share of street fights as a youngster. He hadn’t forgotten how to give as much punishment as he received. There were no rules for this kind of fight. He caught one of the slender attackers in the groin with a savage kick. The youth doubled over with a soft moan. Gerella had a disconcerting impression the victim was not a boy but a girl.

  With a guttural cry—Gerella heard only the word Dios!—the second of the smaller figures charged. Gerella heard the sharp click of a knife blade jumping from its sheath. He was moving even before his brain consciously identified the sound. The blade tugged at his jacket. Gerella threw a right-hand punch. He felt a leap of excitement as his fist landed. Bone and cartilage yielded under the blow. Two down!

  The satisfaction was short-lived. As the chunky attacker moved in, Gerella aimed a kick at his kneecap. He wasn’t quick enough. The first solid blow from the object in the stocky man’s hand caught Gerella on the biceps. It numbed his entire arm and shoulder. A shocking pain stabbed through his whole body.

  Demoralized by that blow, the reporter tried to ward off another with his one good arm. He knew that no fist could strike with such terrible force. He wanted to run but his feet were suddenly clumsy. He remembered how his father tried to walk after his stroke, how he would be on the sides of his feet without knowing it.

  Hands plucked at Gerella’s arms from behind. For an instant only he was caught and held. It was enough. He was helpless when a fourteen-inch length of lead pipe crushed his jaw. His mouth was suddenly filled with blood and fragments of teeth. He screamed, but he was not sure there was any sound. Maybe the scream was only inside his head.

  The entire attack had taken place in deadly, purposeful silence, broken only by that one muttered Spanish oath, by the slap and scuff of shoe leather, grunts and exploding breaths, the smack of bone on flesh—until that deceptively silent impact against the side of Gerella’s face. There had been no cries to alert anyone in the apartment building. No one appeared at any of the windows. No one was in the street. No one could help him.

  Gerella sagged
to the sidewalk. His body involuntarily curled into a protective ball. Other blows and kicks punished him as he lay on the sidewalk at the foot of the steps. He was hardly aware of them. The pain of his broken jaw was all-enveloping. He wanted to scream at them. Why? Why do this for a lousy ten bucks?

  Just before the last blow from the pipe battered him unconscious, Gerella knew that this was not just another Saturday-night mugging. It wasn’t for ten bucks. It was an attack far more callous and dangerous.

  He sank toward blackness, as if the sidewalk were melting beneath him. One of the attackers’ faces loomed over him. It seemed bloated, as if distorted by the curve of a camera lens. Beneath the smeared nose the youth’s mouth moved. Gerella heard a single contemptuous word, harsh and clear: “Traidor!” His mind seized upon the word, puzzled over it, tried to understand what it meant.

  Traitor. Betrayer.

  The sense of it slipped away, and there was only darkness and pain.

  * * * *

  At about the same moment Joseph Gerella lost consciousness, in their suburban home on the other side of Washington, Paul and Jan Macimer were climbing into bed. To his surprise Jan did not seem sleepy. She wanted to talk.

  “It’s not the same,” she said, after turning out the light and settling in beside him. “Nothing is anymore.”

  “That sounds very significant,” he murmured. He had to force his eyelids open.

  “It wasn’t the same tonight. Oh, I enjoyed seeing them all again, especially Mary. And I’m glad you asked her and Gordon over. She’s stuck in that motel while he’s down at the Academy.” Jan paused. “You can’t go back. Even we can’t go back.”

  “That sounds gloomy.”

  “I was a bobby-soxer once, remember? I went on fraternity weekends and wondered about kissing on our first date. I wore your pin. I never made love to anyone else.”