by James Philip
The man had been listening with mounting concern, humbled by the confessional tone of what he was learning.
“Miranda?” Gregory asked like an idiot before he realized he had opened his mouth.
Darlene groaned in anguish and squeezed the man’s hand so hard her nails dug in painfully.
“I thought you knew,” she bemoaned. “I’m sorry, I...”
Gregory resisted the temptation to say something trite, some kind of throwaway remark hurriedly designed to make Darlene feel better. Basically, he was not about to pull a remark like that off the shelf without thinking about it first and by then it would be too late.
“I knew Miranda had gone off the rails,” he confessed. “I didn’t know any of the details. Just that after the war she moved in with Aunt Molly and Uncle Harvey and last year she went back to college. My Ma and Pa were so relieved she was back, well, we all were that nobody wanted to upset her, or my Aunt and Uncle by asking any awkward questions...”
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said...”
He patted her thigh.
“I won’t say anything to Miranda. Or anybody, I promise.”
Darlene sniffed a tear and he ached to wrap her in his arms.
Gregory ruminated, hating not being able to wave a magic wand and make Darlene’s terrors disappear in a puff of mystical smoke. The best piece of advice Uncle Harvey had ever given him was that ‘sometimes you have to stop talking about important stuff’. His Uncle was the wisest and the most reasonable man he had yet met in his relatively young life. Another of his axioms was: ‘The important stuff never goes away; that’s how you know it’s important. It’ll always still be there tomorrow so you don’t have to always fix it right now.’
He might have interpreted this as a justification for procrastination but that was not what his Uncle had been advocating. There was a big difference between prevaricating, obfuscating and putting off decisions because one was afraid of making a mistake; and creating a little ‘head room’ space in which one might, all things being equal, find the time and the wit to figure out the best way forward.
“I never finished telling you about the bootleggers of Sausalito,” he decided, his voice wry and mischievous. “Back in the day – Prohibition days, that is – bootleggers coming up or down the coast landed and stashed most of their hooch at Sausalito. It was famous for its so-called ‘rum-runners’. Positively notorious, in fact!”
Darlene was silent.
She liked the sound of his voice, and his soft Yankee drawl cut through with an odd core of something, for want of a better word, she thought of as ‘Englishness’. He had said his folks had sent him to the ‘best schools’ on the East Coast and he had been a year at Princeton before he came ‘back’ home to California just before the October War. She could imagine him standing in front of a class of eighth or ninth graders, fixing their attention and spinning tales carefully seeded with memorable way points, all the easier to recall the next day, week and year.
“Which brings me to Sally Stanford and the Valhalla Inn. We actually walked past it this morning, it’s at the corner of 2nd Street and Main Street. The address confuses people because actually 2nd Street is three or four blocks along Bridgeway. Sally Stanford bought the Valhalla Inn a few years back just before she started trying to get elected to the Council in Sausalito, much to the consternation of the good people of the town and, I might say, the amusement and entertainment of the rest of us.”
“Who is Sally Stanford?” Darlene asked, unable to stop herself.
Gregory chortled in the darkness.
“Let’s put it this way,” he guffawed gently, “between about 1940 and 1949 she ran the most famous bordello in San Francisco at 1144 Pine Street, a couple of blocks down from my Aunt and Uncle’s house, actually. After the United Nations was founded at a conference in the city in 1945 a columnist in the San Francisco Chronicle, a man called Herb Caen, remarked that ‘the United Nations was founded at Sally Stanford’s whorehouse’, if you’ll forgive my language...”
Darlene giggled.
“The legend is that so many of the delegates to the founding conference were Sally Stanford’s clients that during the conference there was a whole mess of secret informal meetings in the living room of 1144 Pine Street; and that those meetings were the difference between the United Nations getting set up and everybody going home and starting World War Three seventeen years early!”
“You’re making fun of me,” Darlene suggested, without minding in the least.
“Perish the thought,” he countered, “like a lot of these ‘legends’ there’s probably more than a grain of truth in it. Heck, Sally Stanford is ten times as real as most of the big men in the Bay Area. Of course, ‘Stanford’ isn’t her real name. Sally was born Mabel Janice Busby in Oregon and moved to the Bay in 1924. She would have been twenty or twenty-one at the time. Nobody is quite sure why she settled on ‘Stanford’ as a surname. Some people think it was because her house of ill repute on Pine Street was designed by an architect called Stanford White; another story is that one day she saw a headline saying that Stanford had won a football game. My favourite story is the one where she allegedly said something to the effect that ‘being a madam is like getting a battlefield commission or becoming the dean of women at Stanford University.”
Darlene thought this was a little shocking and tried to stop giggling.
But that was very hard to do.
“Shutting down Sally Stanford’s den of iniquity on Pine Street was Governor Brown’s first big step on the ladder to the governorship,” Gregory went on. “It’s probably what got him elected Attorney General of California in 1950. I’d drive round and show you ‘the house’ but it was knocked down the year before the war and they’ve built condominiums on the site.”
“How come you know all this stuff, sweetheart?”
“I applied for two or three teaching jobs in the Bay Area before I got accepted at Sausalito. I thought I’d just turn up and I’d be welcomed with open arms but after a while I got wise; I learned everything I could about the area and the town the kids I’d be teaching came from. History, ethnicity, all the old myths and legends, and every arcane local customs. It was like a post-college research project and once I got started I couldn’t stop, I just wanted to know everything. It was awesome all the stuff I found out. Did you know that the foreshore we were walking along this morning was one of the ten biggest shipyards in the world in the middle of the Second World War?”
Darlene recognized that the man was in full flow and made no attempt to divert him.
“Back in 1942 they dredged a three hundred feet wide deep water channel in Richardson Bay so that big ships – really big ships – could be floated out into San Francisco Bay. Then W.A. Bechtel – that’s the Bechtel Corporation, as in the Bechtel Corporation set up by the current Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, a dude called John McCone – created a division called Marinship, built a temporary township called Marin City on the spoil dredged from the Bay which eventually housed about six thousand of the twenty thousand Sausalito shipyard workers, converted the old Northwestern Pacific Railroad repair yard into a shipyard and started building ships. They originally planned to build six slipways but by the end of the war the yards had taken over most of the waterfront. People in Sausalito still complain about the compulsory purchases and the bulldozing of their homes to set up the yards and to expand them as the war went on. In three years Marinship built fifteen Liberty ships, sixteen fleet oilers and 62 other tankers; and then, almost overnight, it all went away again. Except not everything went away because by the end of the war a lot of the workers in Marin City had brought their families to the town; nearly twenty years later I’m teaching the kids of men, and women – there were a lot of women working in the Marinship yards during the war – who came to work in the Bay Area in those years. Obviously, after the war the jobs went away, Sausalito got to be a place to ‘weekend’ from the city, and logging, fishing and yachting ca
me back. Sausalito go to be a nice place to live again. Funnily enough about the time we met I was looking around trying to find a boat to live on. How would you feel about that, living on a boat?”
Darlene contemplated the question.
“I’ve never been on a boat. I don’t know.”
Chapter 46
Sunday 20th January 1964
Haight Street, San Francisco, California
They came through the smashed front and back doors of the old house at five minutes past four in the morning; National Guardsmen, FBI special agents and San Francisco PD detectives, every man carrying a carbine or a pump action shotgun. There were screams from the kids crashed in the ground floor rooms, and from the buxom black woman lying naked on the bed beside Johnny Seiffert in the big first floor ‘master’ bedroom overlooking the street.
The lights came on but the intruders kept on shining their torches in the face of the hysterical woman who was desperately grabbing for sheets in a hopeless attempt to protect her modesty, and in the face of the man who had known he was living on borrowed time ever since the fuck up at The Troubadour back in December.
Between them the hoodlums he had paid off to put the ‘frighteners’ on that arsehole Doug Weston and Sam fucking Brenckmann – the disloyal, ungrateful little turd – and that fat, greasy, greedy, incompetent shit Reggie O’Connell had fucked up so badly that even now, nearly seven weeks later he still did not begin to understand how things could possibly have gone so wrong.
Fuck it, he had only wanted a piece of Sam Brenckmann – the piece that was rightfully his – he had not wanted the stupid schmuck burned alive, or The Troubadour burned down and he certainly had not wanted Sam locked up in some Hell hole jail looking at five to twenty-five for accessory to murder. Jesus H. Christ! He was even a little – albeit only a very little – sorry about what had happened to Doug Weston. What the fuck was the guy supposed to do when a couple of brain dead bikers on the run from half the gangs in the Valley come at you swinging chains?
However, as strong hands turned him onto his belly, the cold muzzle of an M-1 carbine pressed hard against his neck and the hand cuffs were painfully clicked onto his wrists, the person he was really feeling sorry for was Johnny Seiffert.
He soon realized that the cops had already taken Leila, the pneumatic black dancer he had been fucking the last few days, out of the room. Nobody was screaming any more, that was something. Not that it helped him; he was naked, face down on his ‘love altar’ with his hands cuffed behind his back.
“They’re just kids downstairs,” somebody said gruffly.
“They high?” Another man asked tersely.
“No. Not too bad. Mostly just spooked.”
“Take them downtown. ID them, if the San Francisco PD haven’t got anything outstanding on the books for them let them go in the morning. Just make sure they understand that if they come back here they’ll be arrested and they won’t like what happens next.”
Nobody wanted to talk to Johnny Seiffert.
He listened as people moved around the old house.
Then the breaking began.
The Feds and the cops were going from room to room, turning out cupboards, pulling up carpets, looking under floorboards, methodically breaking as they went.
They were not really searching although sooner or later they would find his guns, his dope, and the pills and the rolls of cash stashed in hidey holes old and new, many of which he had forgotten about months or years ago.
“According to city records this house is owned by a Margery Carol Seiffert?” Somebody shouted in his ear.
“That’s my half-sister,” the man face down on the bed admitted.
“Where is she?”
“Dunno. She was in the Navy. Never came back stateside after the war. The forty-five war, I mean.”
“She give you the house?”
The question bewildered Johnny Seiffert for some seconds.
“No. I think she just,” he tried to shrug his shoulders but his interrogator probably did not notice, “well, forgot about it.”
“What? A big old house on Haight?”
“That’s Margo for you...”
The last time he had seen his half-sister Margo she had told him she did not want anything more to do with him. That was in the summer of 1943. ‘Doctor’ Margo had been shipping out for Hawaii having just bankrolled the weasel attorney who had bust him out of a rap for handling stolen US Army medical supplies.
That was over twenty years ago.
Margo was a hard bitch; they had never liked each other. After the Pacific War was she had been posted to Sixth Fleet in Naples, or someplace around there. Johnny had never travelled outside California, why would he? Geography was not his thing. Margo had ended up on some pissant little island in the Mediterranean. Malta? She could have made a fortune ‘doctoring’ if she had come back to the West Coast; there was no accounting for some people. He had wired her asking for a loan a few years back. She had given him the ‘return to sender’ treatment. If you don’t ask you don’t get, he had lived his whole life looking for the next soft touch to exploit; it was not leeching, it was simply taking what you could get.
“I’m getting cold here!” He protested.
His captors ignored him although one man left the room after they had had a short sotto voce chat amongst themselves.
Johnny took a scintilla of satisfaction from this miniscule triumph, or rather, what he mistakenly interpreted as having been a tiny psychological point scored. He was distracting himself recollecting Leila swallowing his cock – more or less whole, the kid had a real talent – when he suddenly convulsed in shock and rage.
Somebody had poured a bucket of ice cold water on him.
He had pissed himself.
The men in the room were laughing.
“Shut the fuck up!” Barked an angry voice and something smashed down across his cold, wet skinny buttocks.
His buttocks were suddenly stinging like they were on fire.
Johnny Seiffert screamed in agony.
A man leaned down and spoke directly into his left ear.
“If you know what’s good for you you’ll shut the fuck up, you little shit!”
A baseball bat was laid on the bed, business end next to Johnny Seiffert’s face.
“If he opens his mouth give him the water treatment again,” a sniff, a new thought, “oh, and give him another whack!”
Chapter 47
Sunday 20th January 1964
Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California
“How does a two bit attorney who doesn’t even have his own office get to live in a big house in Beverly Hills, Vincent?” Loretta O’Connell asked coquettishly as her quietly spoken, leanly built – like a middleweight only a week or two out of the gym – lover unlocked the door and stepped aside to allow her to enter ahead of him.
They had gone down to Santa Monica for lunch at Casa del Mar– nothing substantial, just soft drinks and coffees – and walked awhile along Ocean Front View beneath palm trees that rustled like Loretta’s expensive lingerie.
She had not asked him why he had been so insistent that she not be at home around noon that day. He had made no move to explain. Instead, he had behaved towards her as he always had on their previous ‘dates’ right up until he fucked her senseless, like a perfect gentleman. They had not got to the ‘fucking senseless’ stage yet today, but Loretta was tingling with anticipation. It occurred to her that today might be different in some way but the fucking was a given, sooner or later. He had had no questions for her today, always before he had only pressed her as far as she wanted to go and made no attempt to put words into her mouth. But today there had been no questions at all; only small talk and grown up flirting as if they were two normal people who just wanted to enjoy each other’s company.
And fuck each other senseless, obviously.
“This place belongs to a client,” the man explained as he followed Loretta into the broad reception lobby.
“This place is like a palace.”
The man smiled.
“Hey,” he guffawed, following her eye as she swung around to take in the high ceiling, the stucco, the great hanging, shimmering chandelier above their heads, “why not? We live in a town in which the city fathers designed City Hall to be a bigger, grander version of the ancient Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.”
Loretta had swooned the first time he had told her a thing like that.
“The what?” She asked like the dumb broad she never was.
“Seriously,” Vincent Meredith grinned. “The architects who designed City Hall scaled up the layout of the Tomb of Mausolus built over two thousand years ago in a place called Bodrum in present-day Turkey. Mausolus was a local ruler in the Persian Empire. He was married to his sister, Artemisia but in those days brothers and sisters often got married. But I kid you not, the guys who designed City Hall in downtown LA in the twenties just scaled up the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus as it was before it was destroyed by an earthquake in the fifteenth century. Hubris, or what?”
Loretta viewed her companion with mock impatience.
“How do you know this stuff, Vincent?”