Till The Old Men Die

by Janet Dawson

  I was on my second cup of coffee when the phone rang. I looked up, startled. It was past eight. I had been immersed in the professor’s files for over an hour, sitting cross-legged on the floor at the back of my office. My answering machine kicked in, but when I heard Alex’s voice, I scrambled to my feet and grabbed the phone.

  “I’m here,” I said, switching off the machine.

  “I’ve got phone numbers and addresses for Pete Pascal, both home and work,” he told me, repeating the information slowly while I wrote it down. After Alex hung up I called Pascal at his home in Daly City and he agreed to meet me before he opened his stationery store at ten. Before leaving my office I tidied up, replacing the professor’s files in the carton I’d been searching. Then I unplugged the coffeepot and left.

  According to a series of articles I’d read recently in one of the San Francisco papers, the Filipino-American community is the fastest-growing Asian minority group in California, and Daly City is northern California’s Little Manila. I found this easy to believe as Pete Pascal and I sat at a table in a bakery a few doors down from Pascal’s store. I heard as much Tagalog as I did English, and the faces around me were predominantly Asian.

  Pascal was a gray-haired man with a stocky figure clothed in blue slacks and a pin-striped shirt. I’d met Sara Manibusan only a few times before her death, so if there was a family resemblance, I didn’t recall it.

  Pascal stirred cream into his coffee. In a precise voice with barely a trace of an accent, he confirmed what I already knew about his late brother-in-law’s plans that January night Dr. Manibusan was murdered.

  “We expected Lito at eight. My store is open until seven on Friday nights, so that gave my wife and me plenty of time to close up and get dinner started. When he didn’t show up, we were concerned, of course. We wondered if he’d changed his plans. But if that was the case, it wasn’t like him not to call and let us know.” He took a bite of his pastry, washing it down with coffee before he continued.

  “I phoned his place in Castro Valley around ten, but there was no answer. Then I called Alex. He didn’t know anything. The police notified him early Saturday morning, and he called me to break the news.” He shook his head slowly. “What a shock. And your poor father, finding Lito’s body like that. He seemed so upset when I met him at the funeral.”

  “Yes, he was. He and Dr. Manibusan were good friends.” I sipped my coffee, asking Pascal for some background information on the Manibusans.

  “Sara was my youngest sister,” he said. “When I came to the States in the early sixties, she was engaged to Lito. They met at the university in Manila, before Lito came over to Berkeley for his doctorate. They corresponded, and when Lito returned to the Philippines, they were married. Lito taught at the university and Sara gave piano lessons in their home. I know they hoped to have children, but it didn’t happen.”

  “What made them decide to come to the United States?”

  Before answering, Pascal poked at his pastry with his fork, then lifted his eyes to mine. “Do you know anything about Philippine history?” he asked finally.

  “A bit.”

  “My native land has a troubled past.” He shrugged, his mouth moving into a wry smile. “It has a troubled present, too. Back in the sixties, when Lito began teaching, things were pretty bad. Marcos was elected in 1965, and he was going to fix everything. Instead, the situation got worse. In the countryside the Communist insurgents and the Muslim separatists were getting stronger. The economy was in a shambles and there was corruption in the government. By the early seventies people were protesting. Things got violent. You can’t imagine what Manila was like.”

  “So Lito and Sara decided to leave?”

  “Yes,” Pascal said. “As things deteriorated, they made up their minds to leave the Philippines and come to America. They were at the Plaza Miranda in August 1971 for a Liberal Party rally when a number of bombs went off. Several people were killed, and more than a hundred injured, including some of Lito’s students. Lito was a Liberal Party supporter and he greatly admired Benigno Aquino. Then Marcos declared martial law in September 1972 and Ninoy was arrested. We were all relieved that Sara and Lito were able to leave shortly after that.”

  “What did they have to do to get a visa?”

  “It takes a long time,” Pascal said with a shake of his head. “By then I was a naturalized citizen. And so was Lito’s older sister, Alex’s mother. My immediate family members, like my wife, my mother, and my children, I brought them over right away. But for a brother or a sister, this takes much longer. The wait can be fifteen, twenty years now. It’s no wonder so many people come in” — he looked around and lowered his voice —” illegally.”

  “Does that happen often?”

  Pascal nodded. “Very much. There are people who marry Americans, like tourists, or servicemen from the American bases, to get a spouse visa in order to enter the United States. Others come over on tourist or student visas and just stay. Once here, they buy phony green cards. I hear there’s a big trade in forged documents. As a businessman, I have to be careful, because if I hire an illegal alien, INS comes after me and slaps me with employer sanctions.”

  “But the Manibusans didn’t have to do that. Alex told me that Lito had some kind of skilled labor preference.”

  “Preference three. He used his connections from his graduate student days at Berkeley. It took several years, but when he and Sara came over in 1973, Lito had a job waiting for him at Cal State in Hayward. He really enjoyed teaching there. Everything was going so well. Sara and Lito became citizens, they bought their place in Castro Valley.”

  “Then Sara was diagnosed with breast cancer.”

  He nodded, his expression saddened. “Yes. It was a tragedy. She found this lump, and six months later she was gone. Lito was... desolate.”

  “Do you think it likely that he would marry again?”

  “Lito?” Pascal’s eyebrows shot up. “Get married? But he didn’t.”

  “There’s a chance that he did, on that trip to the Philippines last summer,” I said without mentioning Dolores Cruz and her claim of marriage to Lito Manibusan.

  For a moment Pascal looked shocked at the idea. Then his face turned thoughtful. “If he married again, this is news to me. I can’t claim to know what was going on in his mind. After Sara died, he kept to himself. We didn’t see him as frequently, though he was always invited to family gatherings. He was a fine man, a professor, handsome and in good health. Any woman would have been proud to marry Lito. But I don’t think he wanted to go out with women, let alone marry again. If he suddenly got married on his trip to the Philippines, that was an impulsive thing to do.” Pascal moved his head slowly from side to side. “I must tell you, Miss Howard, my brother-in-law was not an impulsive man.”

  Based on my own brief and casual acquaintance, I didn’t think Lito Manibusan was an impulsive man either. It was completely out of character for that quiet, professorial widower to suddenly marry a woman in Manila on his last trip to the Philippines, and then, as Alex pointed out, not tell anyone about it. Dolores Cruz’s claim was such an obvious scam, transparent as cellophane. Yet she must have thought it the only way she could gain access to the professor’s files. The stakes were no doubt high.

  “When was the last time you spoke with Lito?” I asked Pascal.

  “Thursday, the day before he died. He called to confirm our dinner plans for Friday night.”

  “He said nothing to you about going to San Francisco before coming to Daly City? Some sort of appointment or errand he had to do first?”

  Pascal shook his head. “Nothing at all.”

  “Think back to other conversations you had with him, between the time he returned from the Philippines last summer and his death in January. Anything special come to mind?”

  Pascal finished his pastry and leaned over the table, lowering his voice. “Politics. Always politics.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Right before Lito went
to the Philippines last summer, there was another coup attempt against Corazon Aquino, one of many since the revolution, I’m sorry to say. Lito and I talked about that a great deal when he returned, and about the mood of people back home in Manila. We didn’t agree on a lot of things. I think this is normal whenever two Filipinos talk politics

  “Even two American citizens?” I asked him.

  “We have feet in both worlds,” Pascal said with a shake of his head. “Everyone has an opinion, or two, or three. And we are more than willing to tell you about it. Sometimes it even leads to violence. You’ve heard about those men in Seattle?”

  I nodded. Pascal was referring to two Filipinos convicted of murdering an anti-Marcos labor leader in Washington State. That case had the unsavory odor of death squads, something Americans didn’t like to think could happen in the United States. But it was right here in Daly City that Chinese-American journalist Henry Liu had been gunned down in his own driveway by Taiwanese gangsters allegedly working for the government in Taipei.

  “Here we have the same divisions and factions that they do back in the Philippines,” Pascal was saying. “Lito was very much a supporter of Aquino. Others, like Hector Guzman, for example, make no secret of their pro-Marcos leanings.”

  “Even though Marcos is dead? And who’s Hector Guzman?”

  “Imelda and her children are very much alive. Hector Guzman is a real estate tycoon here in Daly City. Very rich, very influential. Bong-Bong stayed with him the last time he was in the Bay Area,” Pascal said, referring to Marcos’s son by his nickname.

  “What do you know about the Manibusan family?” I asked.

  “They lived for many years in San Ygnacio,” Pascal said. “That’s a town near Lubao in the southern part of Pampanga Province. It’s mostly flat, with sugar cane and rice fields as far as you can see. Lito’s grandfather — and mine — was mestizo, a little bit of Indio, Spanish, Chinese. He fought with Aguinaldo against the Americans in the Philippine Insurrection, after the islands were liberated from Spain. When the insurrectos were defeated, he settled in San Ygnacio and owned a little store.”

  Pascal stopped to sip his coffee, then continued. “Carlos, Lito’s father, was educated by the Americans and he became a teacher also. From what Lito told me, Carlos was something of a radical in the thirties, when conditions were so bad for the peasants. It got him in trouble with some of the big landowners in that part of the province.” Pascal shook his head. “You see, Miss Howard, for all those democratic principles the Americans brought with them, the power and the wealth in the Philippines has always rested with those who own the land.”

  “Then came the war,” I said.

  “Ah, yes. It’s ironic, really. Carlos Manibusan lived to see the Americans liberate the Philippines, only to be murdered by Japanese stragglers. That’s when Mrs. Manibusan left San Ygnacio and moved to Manila to live with her sister. Manila was nearly destroyed during the liberation, but it came back to life quickly. Mrs. Manibusan was dead by the time I met the family, through my sister’s engagement to Lito. I understand she was a formidable old woman. She supported herself as a seamstress and managed to send all four of her children to college. Lito, Concepcion, Javier, and Alex’s mother, Maria.”

  “Javier?” I looked across the table at Pascal. This was the first time anyone had mentioned the name. “Javier Manibusan?”

  “Lito’s older brother. Alex didn’t mention him?” I shook my head. “Javier went to seminary to be a priest, but he was never ordained. He got involved in left-wing politics and liberation theology. The last I heard he was organizing sugar plantation workers in the Central Plains.”

  A dangerous occupation, I thought. Men in power do not give up their power easily. That is as true in the Philippines as it is anywhere else. I remembered the book at Alex’s apartment, with a marker stuck in the section about the New Peopie’s Army. Perhaps Alex’s interest in the insurgency went beyond current affairs into the realm of the personal.

  I thanked Pascal for his time and left the bakery. As I drove toward San Francisco, I reflected that there was much I didn’t know about the Philippines, or the culture of the people who were immigrating to my corner of northern California in ever-increasing numbers. What I knew was what I read in the newspaper, which focused infrequently on events in the Philippines and how they reverberated through the Filipino-American community in the Bay Area. What I read or heard in the media was filtered through an American perspective. For more than twenty years the Philippines meant the rule of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. First the Marcos regime had been viewed as progressive, stable, democratic, and, most important, anti-Communist. Then it became increasingly evident that Ferdinand and Imelda were Lord and Lady Misrule, and the purported “showcase of democracy” was a shaky house of cards propped up by lies, self-interest, and billions of dollars in American aid. And the Filipinos, back in the archipelago as here in the States, were loyal or in the opposition camp or simply looking out for their own interests.

  From what I read, only the players had changed since the 1986 “people power” sweep that brought Corazon Aquino to the presidency. Now Cory’s hold on power was tenuous as she contended with coup attempts, the acrimonious debate over American military bases on Philippine soil, a rebellious military, and a disintegrating economy. And, of course, agrarian reform, always promised and never accomplished, the never-ending issue of who owns land and who labors on it. Add to that not one, but two insurgencies — Communist and Muslim — and you have a volatile cocktail. Politics is a quagmire, whether in the United States or in the Philippines.

  Before crossing the Bay Bridge to Oakland, I stopped at San Francisco’s Hall of Justice, hoping to talk with Inspector Cobb, one of the homicide detectives handling the still-open Manibusan case. He was in, a short, stocky guy with receding brown curls made all the more unruly by his constant habit of running his left hand through his remaining hair. Most of the cops I see look tired and overworked, and Cobb was no exception. He reiterated what he’d told me on the phone a few days earlier. No leads on the Manibusan case — the investigation was at a dead end. Appeals for witnesses remained unanswered, though SFPD had the usual gang of cranks and nuts confessing to the murder. The only person who reported seeing Dr. Manibusan alive and in San Francisco that rainy January night was my own father.

  Cobb listened with interest as I described the events of the past few days. He assured me that despite media interest in Dad, the only information concerning him that had been officially released was that Dr. Timothy Howard was a professor at Cal State Hayward and a Castro Valley resident. “Let me know if you turn up a lead,” Cobb said as I left his office. “I’m fresh out.”

  Nine

  GEORGE, MY COMPUTER-CONSULTANT NEIGHBOR, was in his own cubicle when I returned to my office, so I walked down the hall to talk with him. He doesn’t fit the stereotypical profile of computer nerd. He’s tall and rangy, his skin burned to a permanent nut-brown by the sun. He spends his weekends in hiking boots tramping up Mount Tamalpais or Mount Diablo in the Bay Area, or heading off to the Sierra Nevada to camp and hike. In fact, he was finishing up a project so he could hit the road for a long weekend in Yosemite, his tabernacle.

  I stood under a poster of Ansel Adams’s famous photograph of Half Dome and asked him to search various data bases for information on Mabuhay Travel and Dolores Cruz, as well as Charles, Arthur, and Perlita Randall. “See if you can find anything on an Edward Villegas,” I added.

  “I’ll do it when I get back on Monday,” he said, tossing a lock of sandy hair back from his face with one hand as the other sped over a keyboard. His pale blue eyes were intent on the computer screen before him.

  Angie Walters at OPD had not yet called me with any information about Villegas. Back in my own office I checked the criss-cross directory for Daly City. The phone number Edward Villegas had given Alex was an address on Serramonte Boulevard. Further checking revealed that the address was that of a restaurant called the Manila
Galleon. Odd, I thought. I picked up the phone and called the Philippine News, verifying what I suspected. No one there had ever heard of a free-lance writer named Edward Villegas.

  As I hung up the phone, I glanced at Dr. Manibusan’s boxes looming like the Great Wall of China, hoping I’d get back to my search for the professor’s envelope — or anything else that might indicate what the professor had been working on at the time of his murder.

  I checked the messages on my answering machine, returned several phone calls, then switched on the computer. I updated the Manibusan file by making notes on my conversations with Pete Pascal and Inspector Cobb. As I was printing out the pages, the phone rang. I picked it up and heard a familiar voice. It was Sid Vernon, my ex-husband, a big man with golden tomcat eyes and an Oakland Police Department detective’s shield. Our divorce had been painful; most divorces are. But the passage of time helped and we were trying to be friends.

  “Hi, Sid. What’s up?”

  “How about lunch?”

  “Sure.” I consulted my watch. It was nearly twelve. “Now?”

  “Yeah. Meet me at Ratto’s.”

  I left my office on Franklin Street and walked toward the Old Oakland development that fronted Broadway between Eighth and Tenth. The buildings are some of the oldest in the city, recently rehabbed and slowly filling with tenants. On Fridays Ninth Street is closed off between Broadway and Clay for a farmers market. This weekly event draws a large crowd of shoppers, especially when the weather’s good and the produce plentiful. It was early in the season, but the street was full of people lured by the warm May sunshine, seductive colors, and the array of fruits and vegetables — and the desire to taste the flavors of this particular slice of urban life.

  As I crossed Broadway I saw a line of wide-eyed Chinese preschoolers on a midday adventure, each with one tiny hand clasping a long, thick rope, this lifeline held at both ends by teachers. Farther down Ninth Street I heard a lilting melody, looked for and found the Peruvian street musicians playing guitar and pipes. Near them an elderly black man leaned on his cane, enjoying the music, his purchases in a canvas bag at his feet.