“Sorry, I don’t. My memory isn’t what it used to be.”
I thanked him and hung up the receiver. The phone booth was quickly claimed by a young woman with reddened eyes and runny mascara. Someone had once commented to me that more tears must be shed in the Hall of Justice than any other building in San Francisco—public or private, and not excepting the funeral homes. I had never doubted the truth of that statement.
By eleven-thirty I was seated at a machine in a quiet corner of the microfilm room at the main branch of the public library. Ghostly images flickered before me as I fast-forwarded through the reels I’d requested, stopping at articles on the Port Chicago bombing attempt and trial. When I’d checked the various periodical indexes, I’d found that coverage had been extensive; one of the national news-magazines had even run a long piece on the case: “Revolutionaries’ Plot Runs Afoul of Governments’ Tough New Stance on Violence.”
What I gleaned from the article jolted me. Taylor and Heikkinen had been sole defendants in the trial; the government had asked for stiff sentences in order to make examples of them for other would-be saboteurs, and each had received five years in federal prison—Taylor at McNeil Island in Washington State, and Heikkinen at a facility in Alderson, West Virginia. The crime of conspiracy to bomb a military installation had held more serious undertones than I’d originally assumed: had they been successful in planting and detonating the bombs, their blast would have taken several lives.
But what surprised me the most was the identity of the prosecution’s chief witness. Jenny Ruhl had been the one to offer the particularly damning testimony that the collective had “deemed the sacrifice of life acceptable and even desirable, given the cause for which they were fighting.”
Libby Ross had told me that what the collective mainly did was engage in endless intense talk; now it seemed that the rhetoric had gotten seriously out of hand. Even though—as the accounts of the trial pointed out—there were significant reasons to doubt parts of Rhul’s testimony, it made me look at the affair in a new light. If the members of the collective had been comfortable with the concept of killing innocent strangers, what other crimes might they have contemplated—or committed? If I kept digging, what else might I turn up? And was that really necessary at this late date? There were people who could be badly hurt: Jess Goodhue, D.A. Taylor’s wife and young children. Perhaps it would be kinder to let the past die, as most of those involved in the case had.
But even as I thought about it, I knew I wouldn’t stop. Tom Grant had been murdered, and my gut-level feelings told me that the forces leading up to his killing had been set in motion by something from the past. True, Grant had been a poor excuse for a human being, but when it comes to murder, an investigator doesn’t establish an A List and a B List. I would keep going simply because it was a valid line of inquiry that McFate seemed unwilling to pursue.
My pages of notes quickly piled up: a chronology of events, key phrases from the trial testimony, addresses, names. Hilderly was only mentioned once, in a list of people suspected of being former members of the collective; the names of Andy Wrightman and Thomas Y. Grant appeared nowhere at all.
After I finished with the first batch of films, I went out to the reference room and rechecked the indexes for articles in radical and alternative publications. Then I returned to the microfilm room and checked out a few reels containing the coverage in the Berkeley Barb—an acerbic, muckraking paper that had achieved national prominence in the sixties. While the establishment press had not attached any particular significance to the fact that four guns had been seized from three people at Port Chicago—Taylor had been carrying two at the time of his arrest—the Barb viewed this with suspicion. One reporter wrote of rumors (possibly created by himself) that there had been a “mysterious fourth person” at the weapons station, who had handed Taylor his or her gun and walked away from the scene when the federal agents appeared. “A Setup!” the Barb’s headlines proclaimed. “An informant in the midst of our courageous brothers and sisters,” and editorial insisted.
“Jenny Ruhl, Traitor” was the title of the profile that appeared immediately after she’d testified at the trial. Ruhl was described as “the pampered daughter of rich Orange County pigs, who was too soft to stand with her brother and sister during their persecution.” Another reporter, less kind, said she was “seriously fucked up, had probably fed information to the enemy all along.” By contrast, Ruhl’s obituary some weeks after the trial categorized her as a “martyr to the Movement” and a “victim of bourgeois values.” It was also posited that she had been “murdered by the pigs.” At that point I decided that the Barb hadn’t been able to make up its mind about Ruhl any more than I could.
My library researches done, I turned in the microfilms and went out to delve further into the past. But first I found a phone and called the hospital for a report on Hank’s condition. Again there had been no change. After some calling around I reached the nursing station at intensive care; Anne-Marie was there, and I convinced the woman on the desk to let me talk to her. She sounded tired and distant, and when I offered to come over and keep her company later, she said she’d rather I didn’t.
“His lung was collapsed, and there was other internal damage as well. They may have to operate again, and if they do, it’ll take every bit of control I have not to fall apart. Seeing a face that’s more than professionally sympathetic would about do me in. Besides,” she added, “his parents are here. And you know how they can be.”
“By that I take it you mean they blame me for him getting shot.”
“Well, it’s a long list. I think perhaps God has been absolved, but I wouldn’t even count on that.”
It was more or less the reaction I would have predicted. The Zahns had spent too many years insulated by their affluence and social position to know how to cope with real adversity. Since their only son had been shot, it was necessary that blame be affixed; accusations and recriminations were excellent weapons against fear and powerlessness, and they both wielded them like pros. I’d often wondered how two such closed and insecure people could have produced someone as open and confident as Hank.
“Well, hang in there,” I said, talking to myself as much as to Anne-Marie. “I’ll check back with you later on.
Often when I’m working a case I find myself drawn to the places where its key events have occurred, even if it’s a long time after the fact. The urge to view these physical setting is more or less instinctive on my part; half the time I’m not even aware of why I’m going there until I arrive. But unscientific and illogical such behavior might seem, I’ve come to trust the impulses that prompt it. And while I rarely stumble upon some overlooked clue or receive a blinding flash of insight, just being there gives me a better sense of the individuals involved and their possible motivations. So, in lieu of any better way to pass the time until I could pick up Wolf’s case file at All Souls, I decided to see what remained of the landscape of twenty years ago.
There was no point in driving all the way out to Port Chicago; I wouldn’t be permitted inside the weapons station and, besides, the scene of the arrest didn’t seem relevant. Nor did I need to return to Berkeley; I knew that territory and it wasn’t where the story really centered. The Federal Building, where the trial had been held, was only two blocks from the library, but I knew what courtrooms looked like and could easily imagine the dry proceedings.
The government’s case, according to the newspaper accounts I’d just read, had been impressive: physical evidence, including guns, pipe bombs, detonating devices, maps of the military installation, and diagrams of where the bombs were to be placed; eyewitness testimony of Jenny Ruhl. The chief government witness, according to one reporter, “never once looked at her former comrades. While on the stand she betrayed neither guilt nor nervousness, speaking in a flat, uninflected voice. When she left the courtroom, she did not look back.” And in the face of her testimony, what little case the defense had built crumbled.
I could understand what had probably driven Ruhl to testify against her former friends. Like many of the would-be revolutionaries of the sixties, her involvement with the collective had been a rebellion against a conservative upbringing, but once arrested, the specter of years in a federal penitentiary had most likely been more than she could bear. In addition, she had a daughter dependent upon her—one whom she might not see for a long time if convicted. The federal prosecutors would have realized Ruhl was the weakest of the three and plied her with offers of a deal.
Yes, I could easily understand why Ruhl had testified for the prosecution. But what puzzled me was her suicide, some weeks after the trial. If Jessica had been one of the reasons for sacrificing her loyalty and twisted code of honor, why had she then left her daughter motherless, with no means of support?
No answer for that—not now, maybe not ever.
The lower Filmore district—just the other side of Van Ness Avenue from the Civic Center—is one of the city’s neighborhoods in transition. Gone are the pig farms of the late 1800s, the jazz clubs of the World War II era, the blighted ghetto of more recent years. Gone too is Winterland—the former ice-skating rink that became a mecca for stoned, music-loving hippies in the sixties. What you have now is an uneasy mixture of urban cultures: luxury condominium complexes next to shabby three-story Victorian houses; trendy restaurants across the street from greasy spoons; a wine shop on one corner, a cut-rate liquor store on the other.
The house on Hayes Street where the members of the collective had lived immediately after their move to San Francisco was no longer there; that block had been cleared to make way for a high rise. But down the street I spotted Jude’s Liquors, where D.A. Taylor had taken on odd jobs from time to time. I parked the MG and followed a plywood-covered walkway around the construction site to the store. There were bars over its plate-glass windows, and the neon signs and faded posters displayed there advertised at least two kinds of beer that were no longer brewed. When I entered, I spotted a young Asian man taking bottles of vodka from a carton and setting them on a shelf behind the counter. I showed him my license, said I’d like to ask him a few questions.
How long had he worked here? He was the owner, had had the store three years now, since the former owner died. No, he didn’t know anything about the people who used to live in the neighborhood, didn’t know much about those who lived there now. He commuted from Richmond. This wasn’t a good place to raise kids.
I went back to the MG and drove a few blocks to Page Street. The collective had some kind of dispute with the landlord of the building on Hayes, and after only a few months had found another place not too many blocks away. That building still stood: three-storied, with a pink concrete-block façade and a sagging front stoop. Again I parked and crossed the street, studying the building. Climbed the steps and examined the mailboxes. There were no names on any of them; one of their doors hung open on broken hinges; a bell push dangled on exposed wires; the steps were littered with newspaper and advertising circulars. The building gave me no sense of the past. I could feel no connection between it and the violent plans that had been formulated within its confines.
I went back down the steps, looked toward the eastern corner of the street. A dry cleaner where Libby Heikkinen had occasionally picked up extra cash by clerking had turned into a too-cutely-named bakery—You Knead it. A young white woman emerged, pushing an infant in a stroller, a baguette protruding from her net shopping bag. But on the opposite corner was the grocery store whose owner had allowed the members of the collective to scrounge through the dumpsters for salvageable food—Rhonda’s Superette. Rhonda Wilson had testified as a character witness for the defense. I hurried down there.
The grocery was the same as corner stores the city over: full of dusty boxed and canned goods that had been too long on the shelves, with narrow aisles, cracked linoleum, and antiquated, wheezing refrigerator cases. A middle-aged black woman sat behind the counter, going over some invoices.
No, she wasn’t Rhonda Wilson. She and her husband had bought the store from her back in the mid-seventies. Rhonda had moved to Nevada, but she wasn’t sure she was still there. No, she didn’t recall anything about the people up the street who’d been arrested by the FBI—she’d still been living in Texas then and had never even heard about the case. Anyone in the neighborhood who might remember? Well, there was old Cal. Cal had gotten busted up in an accident in the shipyards back in the early sixties. On good days he sat out on the sidewalk in his wheelchair and passed the time of day with whoever came by; on foggy days like this you could usually find him in the family Dodge that his wife kept parked at the curb.
“Cal’s a do-gooder,” the woman added. “Writes letters, takes up things that’re wrong in the neighborhood with the folks at city hall. People like him; even the junkies and the cops on the beat like him. That car? It hasn’t been moved in years, that I know of. But it just sits there and the street cleaners go right around it and nobody ever gives it a ticket.
When I heard things like that, it restored my faith in a city that often struck me as increasingly old and indifferent. I thanked the woman, bought a Hershey bar—the emergency chocolate supply in my purse was probably running low—and went out to see what Cal could tell me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The faded maroon-and-white Dodge with swooping tailfins was parked three or four doors from the collective’s last address. A pair of old men stood next to it, their arms propped on its roof, talking with someone inside. Both men were bundled in overcoats against the chill fog; one even wore a knitted cap with earflaps. I walked down there and loitered on the sidewalk behind them, waiting for them to conclude their conversation. It was about the possibility of the new downtown stadium to replace Candlestick Park. The men on the sidewalk were all for it; the man in the car—whom I couldn’t as yet see—wasn’t opposed to the idea, but he considered it evidence of the prevailing “two-faced attitude” at city hall.
“They tell you one thing during the campaign,” he said in a gravelly voice, “and after you vote ‘em in, you got something else entirely.”
The man with the knitted cap said, “Well, why don’t you just write a letter, Cal, let the mayor know what you think?”
“I might at that.”
I was about to interrupt during the brief lull in the conversation, but the other man on the sidewalk stepped back a little, and the car’s occupant saw me. “Move aside boys,” he said. “Here’s a young lady come to see me. I got better things to do that shoot the breeze with a couple of old farts.”
“You just too popular, Cal.” The man in the knitted cap motioned me to step up to the Dodge, and he and his companion turned away. “Catch you later,” he added.
Old Cal was perhaps in his mid-sixties, with white hair and the kind of dark skin that has an almost purple tinge. His upper body was powerful, with heavily muscled shoulders and biceps; in contrast, his crippled legs, covered by a green plaid blanket and extending from the car so his feet rested on the curb, looked deflated. One glance into his lively eyes told me that the ability to walk was the only faculty this man was lacking.
He smiled in welcome and jerked his head toward the departing men. “That’s what happens when a man retires,” he said. “Ain’t got no resources, neither of them. They’ll sure as hell end up downtown to the Two A.M. Club and bet shit-faced by normal man’s quitting time. Now, me—I ain’t been able to work a day since sixty-three, but you can always find me here listenin’ to what people got to say. Nighttimes, like as not I’m at my typewriter writing’ letters, seein’ things get done around here. Keeps a man going.” He paused, shook his head. “Makes him talkative, too. Cal Hurley’s the name. I take it you looking for me.”
I shook his extended hand. “The lady at Rhonda’s Superette told me where to find you.”
He took the business card I held out and examined it with interest. “I like what I hear bout you folks at All Souls. You don’t put up with shit from city hall any mo
re than I do. How’s that fellow got shot last night? He gonna be okay?”
“. . . I don’t know. He’s in bad shape.”
“Shame. You the lady collared the sniper. Picture of you in the Chron. Didn’t do you justice, though.”
I knew which picture he meant. Why the paper persisted in keeping that particular one on file. . .
I must have looked fairly depressed, because the lines around Cal Hurley’s eyes crinkled in sympathy. He said, “Whyn’t you get in the backseat there? You look like you could use to sit. Cold on the sidewalk.”
I opened the rear door of the Dodge and climbed in behind him. The plush maroon upholstery smelled of cigar smoke.
Cal Hurley twisted slightly so he could look at me. “This about that business last night?”
“No, although it’s related in a way.” Briefly I filled him in on the background of my case. “That pink house four doors down”—I motioned at it—“was where the people lived when they were arrested. I wonder if you remember anything about them.”
He didn’t need to look to see which house I meant. “Funny thing, that was. I took note of those kids right off, on account of them not fitting in here.”
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