The Brea File

by Louis Charbonneau

  “I know what you’re all thinking,” James Caughey said, “and I don’t buy any of it.”

  “No one is being accused of anything—yet,” John Landers said sharply. “Not without proof.” He glared at his three executive assistants, none of whom spoke. Finally his angry gaze settled once more on Russell Halbig. “Have the Office of Professional Responsibility briefed on the entire case to date. I will talk to the Attorney General myself. The integrity of the Bureau is involved in this case. One way or another, I want it cleared up—and I want it before Monday!”

  Landers did not have to remind the other men of another unspoken question hovering over the meeting: How would Senator Sederholm’s committee react to an FBI scandal on the eve of hearings to confirm Landers’ appointment as Director of the FBI?

  * * * *

  “How the hell did someone else get to Shoup before we did? How was he found?” Paul Macimer demanded. No one in the Washington Field Office had ever seen him angrier. “What the hell were we doing out there?”

  Jack Wagner and Calvin Rayburn did not look at each other. They sat stiffly and uncomfortably in the two chairs across from Macimer’s desk, reluctant to draw personal attention by any movement. Wagner, for once, was unable to think of any humorous remark, and would not have made it if he did.

  Finally Rayburn said, “We didn’t cut spoor, it’s as simple as that. Sometimes you have to get lucky.”

  “I’d like to think we rely on something besides luck,” the SAC said sarcastically. He had picked up a pencil and was tapping it back and forth, reversing the ends. Watching him, Wagner thought of Johnny Carson, who used a pencil that way as an unconscious prop on his late-night television show. Wagner winced as Macimer abruptly snapped the pencil in half between his fingers. “Damn it, he didn’t live six blocks from Fedco—he was right under your noses all the time!”

  After another awkward moment of silence, Wagner said, “What about the other guys? I guess they didn’t stumble on anything either.” He realized as he spoke that attempting to divert the heat to another target probably wasn’t going to work.

  “What other guys?” Macimer snapped.

  This time Wagner exchanged glances with Rayburn. He cleared his throat. “We weren’t the only ones assigned out there,” he said cautiously.

  “You were the only ones from the Special squad—or from this office.” Macimer paused, suddenly alert. “Who did you see?”

  “Well… I don’t know who he was, but I’d swear this one guy was Bureau. I spotted him Friday night at Fedco. I’ve seen him before, I know that.”

  “What did he look like?”

  Wagner shifted uneasily. He had the feeling he was walking through a minefield. “I didn’t get a real good look at him…”

  “Just good enough to be sure you’d seen him before.” Macimer’s tone was dangerously soft.

  “Yes, sir. But he was on surveillance, I’m sure of that. You get so you have a feeling for it.”

  “Did you see him, too, Rayburn?”

  Rayburn shook his head. He seemed relieved to be clear of that particular line of fire.

  Macimer stared at Wagner. He too felt a prickle of warning over the suggestion that another agent had been looking for Raymond Shoup. Who was he? And who had assigned him to a case already being covered by the Special squad?

  “You’re sure he wasn’t MPD?” Macimer asked abruptly.

  Wagner broke off a shrug, seizing on the question as a possible way to safer ground. “Could be he was a city cop, someone I’ve met before. Maybe he was working another case altogether.” Wagner paused a moment before venturing to add, “But I was sure you’d put the kid out there…” His voice trailed off uncertainly.

  “What kid?”

  “Why… Stearns, of course. Agent Stearns.”

  * * * *

  Macimer didn’t bother with the intercom to call Stearns to his office. His summons rattled some glass partitions. Stearns entered hesitantly as Wagner and Rayburn hurried out, glad to escape. The young agent’s eyes were miserable, haunted by dark circles. Defeated, Macimer thought. He felt his anger drain away.

  He allowed Harrison Stearns to sit in silence for a moment, pulling himself together, before he said, “Okay, let’s have it, Stearns. What were you doing at Fedco?”

  In a dull, empty voice, bereft of hope for himself, Stearns recounted his attempt to trace the thief who had stolen his FBI vehicle, a theft Stearns held himself personally responsible for. The SAC’s expression remained impassive as the young agent described his after-hours vigils over the weekend. On Sunday night Stearns had thought he was onto something. He had followed a youth whom he had spotted loitering near the parking lot of Farrantino’s Restaurant, where there had been a number of recent thefts from parked cars. “I wondered if maybe our thief might not have a record because he wasn’t into stealing cars so much as stealing from them. Stealing my car might have been a freak thing because the keys just fell into his hand. This kid was acting suspicious, all right, but that’s all I had. I couldn’t be sure he was the right one. I followed him to this boardinghouse where he lived and I found out who he was. I figured that was all I could do then.”

  Stearns had intended to pursue his investigation further when he finished his desk assignment Monday. As it happened, he didn’t get away from the WFO until after seven o’clock. He returned to the boardinghouse where he had tracked the suspect. He parked a short distance away and staked out the place from his car, but the youth never appeared. After two hours or so Stearns gave up for the night. By then, he now knew, Raymond Shoup was dead.

  “Why didn’t you put your suspicions on report?” Macimer asked quietly.

  “At that point I thought it was just a shot in the dark. I couldn’t be sure it was him.” There was a dogged truthfulness in the words rather than an attempt to justify himself. “I only saw him at a distance Sunday night, and it was dark. And I never got much of a look at the one I bumped into the night I lost the car.”

  “If you’d made a report, we could have checked him out yesterday. Instead… someone else did.”

  “But how did anyone else find him? How could anyone else know who he was?”

  Macimer regarded the young agent with what was, under the circumstances, a surprising amount of sympathy. The fact was that, rather than making a second major blunder within a month’s time, Stearns had done a commendable piece of investigation on his own initiative. He had just missed breaking the case—arriving at the boardinghouse within minutes of the time Shoup left. Understandably, that was not the way Stearns saw it at the moment. It might not be the way Headquarters saw it.

  “There’s only one way anyone else could have found Raymond Shoup,” Macimer said. There was no way to soften the blow. “He followed you, Stearns. He guessed that you might be on the right track, and he followed you.”

  Harrison Stearns’s face was ashen in the seconds following Macimer’s quiet statement. “Oh my God!” he whispered.

  * * * *

  On the way to the hospital in Georgetown, Macimer stopped at the boardinghouse where Raymond Shoup had been staying and spoke briefly with the manager. Alice Volker had “just happened” to hear portions of a telephone conversation Shoup had had just before hurriedly leaving his room shortly after seven o’clock Monday evening. What the woman had heard was not helpful, but Macimer left his office and home phone numbers with her. She might remember something else, he suggested. Alice Volker seemed eager to cooperate. “Such a nice young man, he was,” she said, and Macimer guessed that she would repeat those words before television news cameras, if she hadn’t already done so. “Who could have done such a thing to him?”

  Macimer drove on to Georgetown. Raymond Shoup had not been such a nice young man, but he hadn’t deserved his fate. Such ends were not neatly doled out; the punishment didn’t always fit the crime. Shoup had died because he knew too much—or asked for too much. Or simply because he had the file.

  And was the Brea file now
in the hands of his murderer?

  Macimer found a space in the crowded visitors’ parking lot at Georgetown University Hospital and sat for a moment in the car, ignoring the heat that quickly gathered under the roof on this hot, bright morning. He thought of the way he had been manipulated by the man who called himself Antonelli—a man almost certainly involved in Raymond Shoup’s death. The youth’s murder had been cold-bloodedly planned. And Macimer had been meant to find him.

  But why Macimer? What had been gained by that?

  Macimer stepped out of the car into the morning glare. He did not notice the two men who had parked their gray Fairmont sedan so that the morning sun reflected off the windshield, rendering them almost invisible. They watched him enter the hospital before the man in the passenger’s seat spoke briefly into the car radio.

  * * * *

  Joseph Gerella had been removed from the critical list of the Shock Trauma Unit at Georgetown University Hospital. Macimer found him in a semi-private room on the third floor. The adjoining bed was empty.

  For several moments Macimer stood motionless in the quiet room, thinking that Gerella was asleep. Over the years Macimer had seen many people beaten, brutalized, shot, overdosed on drugs, drowned, stabbed, hacked and mauled—the endless march of society’s victims. His stomach no longer automatically heaved at the sight of violence or death. Nevertheless, the condition of Joseph Gerella sickened him. The reporter’s face was swollen and distorted under his heavy layer of bandages. His chest was similarly wrapped, his right arm in a cast. His breathing was a labored wheeze. His jaw had been wired shut, leaving an opening only large enough for a glass straw, forcing him to breathe through his nose.

  Only one eye was visible. It was open, staring at Macimer.

  That single eye followed him as he drew closer to the bed. Without a framework of facial expression to define it, Gerella’s stare was impossible to read. Impaled by that one eye, Macimer felt compelled to say, “You’re wrong if you think the Bureau had anything to do with this.”

  Gerella fumbled with his free hand for the tray at the side of the bed. Macimer saw a 5x7-inch pad of white notepaper and a felt-tip pen. He handed them to Gerella. The reporter printed his reply with his left hand while balancing the pad awkwardly on his stomach. The letters were childish in construction: Gerella was right-handed. His message, blocked out in capital letters, read: WHAT HAPPENED TO THE PRC?

  Straight for the jugular. Staring at the note in silence, Macimer felt an ungrudging admiration. Gerella wouldn’t quit.

  “What do you know?” he asked. “The people who attacked you searched your apartment. What were they after, Gerella?”

  The eye was not surprised. Packard would have discussed the search with his reporter, trying to learn what might be missing.

  “I know you received some communications from an informant,” the FBI man said. “Pages from a missing FBI file concerning the PRC case.” He leaned closer. Two eyes were better for glaring than one. “This is important, Gerella. What was in those pages?”

  Gerella attempted to print a response. The note pad slipped from his stomach and he grabbed for it with his free hand. His eye snapped shut and his body quivered with pain from the sudden movement.

  Macimer retrieved the pad. He held it firmly in place while Gerella completed his awkward message. The reporter sank back as if exhausted, his eye closing.

  After reading the message quickly, Macimer went back over it, frowning. NAMES & ASSIGNMENTS. FBI. AUG 28 – 81. PRC.

  He waited for Gerella to look at him again. The single lid rose slowly, the eye staring. “That’s all? An assignment roster, something like that?” When Gerella blinked slowly in the affirmative, Macimer asked, “In and out times? Destinations?”

  His mind raced ahead of the reporter’s confirmation. Assignment and activity listings were routine. Signing out was mandatory in most situations. What could be important about these records? Important enough to kill for?

  Or was there, buried somewhere in those routine postings, proof that could be linked with other documentation to show that someone was not where he was supposed to be that day?

  All it needed was someone—Vernon Lippert—to start looking!

  Controlled excitement. Not so overriding that Macimer lost sight of something different in Gerella’s expression, a hostility that expressed itself even with most of the reporter’s face masked in bandages. Gerella fumbled for the note pad once more. Laboriously he printed out a terse note. Reading it, Macimer understood Gerella’s silent accusation. YOUR NAME – ON LIST!

  For another moment Macimer met the probing stare of that single baleful eye. The fact that a roster of assignments for the People’s Revolutionary Committee FBI Task Force on August 28, 1981, should contain his name and assignment neither concerned nor surprised him. He had been chasing a phony tip that day that took him to Fresno, well away from the action….

  He felt a prickling sensation. He was remembering the unknown informant who had not shown up at the motel in Fresno where Macimer waited.

  “You shouldn’t have withheld those records from the FBI,” he said. “If you’d come to us in the first place, your informant might still be alive.”

  He saw the shock in Gerella’s visible eye. There had been nothing in the information released to the media about the Roosevelt Island murder to allow Gerella to make the connection to his informant.

  “He was murdered last night,” Macimer said bluntly. “And the rest of the file is gone.” Watching Gerella’s eye close tightly, the lid squeezing, Macimer felt the other man’s pain. His own anger eased. “You were wrong in withholding evidence, Gerella, but you were right about something else—something you said that first night we talked. About how important it is to keep the law on a tight rein. We need rules to go by, just like everyone else. What happened to you was a taste of the anarchy that takes over when any man can make his own rules.”

  Macimer saw the puzzled speculation in Gerella’s eye. It was still there when the FBI man walked out.

  * * * *

  From the hospital lobby Macimer called the WFO. He instructed Harrison Stearns to try to locate Agents Collins and Garvey in California and have them stand by. The order was urgent. Macimer would be in the office in twenty minutes.

  “Should I get the Sacramento office in on it? I mean, let them know it’s urgent?”

  “No,” said Macimer. “Just find Collins and Garvey yourself. I don’t want anyone else involved.”

  20

  The temperature that afternoon was in the low eighties and humid. Chip Macimer had disappeared with some friends and an ice-cold six-pack. Kevin had gone to the community pool. Alone in the house, Linda Macimer answered the phone when it rang. She recognized Carole Baumgartner’s voice. When Linda said her mother was out, Carole surprised her. How would Linda herself like to get out of the house and play some tennis?

  Twenty minutes later, happily relaxing in the comfortable passenger seat of Carole’s white BMW coupe, Linda said, “This is neat! Am I ever glad to get out of that house.”

  “I thought you were all one big happy family there.”

  “Mom and Dad love it. You know, we’ve always bounced around from one place to another, so we never had a real house of our own.”

  “But you don’t like it?”

  “I did… but not now.” Linda shivered, her bare arms prickling with gooseflesh in spite of the rush of warm air through the open window. “I hate being there alone.”

  “You should have a boyfriend stay with you.”

  Linda glanced at her quickly, her enthusiasm cooling. “Did Mom ask you to talk to me?”

  “I told her I wanted to,” Carole Baumgartner admitted frankly. “But no… she doesn’t know about today. In fact, when I called this afternoon I knew Jan was going to be at the travel agency—she told me last night.” Carole laughed lightly. “Jan is afraid I might try to win you over to my side.”

  “What side is that?”

  “Yo
u don’t know?” Carole laughed again, a warm and throaty laughter. She was, Linda thought, a very beautiful woman. And so cool, so smart, so… sure of herself. “I’m supposed to be an extremist of the women’s movement. Hard core, you know, up the bastards. My side is…” Her expression became gentle, sympathetic, infinitely wise. “… the woman’s side. And make no mistake, Linda. That means your side.”

  * * * *

  The Horizon Hills Country Club looked invitingly plush with its unnaturally green lawns and the dun-colored modern architecture of its buildings. Linda was wearing her tennis shorts and a T-shirt. Carole Baumgartner changed into a smart tennis outfit in the locker room. Her arms and legs were smoothly muscled and evenly tanned. She looked no more than thirty, Linda thought. It was hard to believe she had a teen-age daughter of her own.

  There were a half-dozen tennis courts, all of them busy. The still, warm air was filled with the steady plop of ball against strings, sunlight glinting off aluminum and steel and carbon tennis rackets, the busy courts showcases of expensive and fashionable outfits, expensive and less spectacular skills.

  Carole Baumgartner had reserved a court, and in a few minutes she and Linda were out on the hard surface, quickly falling into a ritualistic pattern of serve-and-volley, serve-and-volley. Linda had been playing regularly for two years and could more than hold her own with most of the girls in her high school class. She liked to play deep, relying on her ability to return shots steadily from the back of the court until her opponent made a mistake. Carole played aggressively, constantly forcing, attacking the net. She kept the younger girl running. In spite of her seventeen-year-old legs, Linda had to beg for a breather after the second set.