by James Philip
As if on cue Judy’s unborn baby kicked.
“That is just so spooky!” Sabrina exclaimed, purring like a proud mountain lioness.
“He’s getting impatient,” Judy giggled. Sam had taken her to see a doctor on Mulholland Avenue a couple of times early in her pregnancy; and a month ago to a clinic in LA. According to the experts the baby was not due for another month but what did they know?
Sabrina was arching both her eyebrows at the writing pad Judy had put down when she came in.
“I thought I’d write Sam’s Mom a proper letter,” Judy explained, feeling a little uneasy. Joanne Brenckmann’s week old letter – it had actually been posted in Boston nearly three weeks ago – had arrived like a bolt from the blue. Ten closely written pages in a clear, strong hand, very businesslike in a fond, folksy sort of way; the concise story of the Brenckmann family in war and peace in the last year. Sam had guessed about his kid sister the moment he heard about what had happened to Buffalo, so that had not come as a complete shock but deep down, he had not yet accepted the awfulness of it. “I thought I’d write her a letter now and send it when the baby is born.”
“My mothers-in-law all hated me,” Sabrina confessed proudly, and was then momentarily distracted by the tiny kicking pressure on her hand, still gently pressed to her friend’s belly. “That does it every time,” she murmured.
“Sam’s Mom seems like a nice lady.”
“That’s why Sam dropped out of college and came to California!”
“No, seriously. You and I both know that Sam would have done that anyway,” Judy retorted. “It wasn’t as if he had some kind of huge fight with his folks. Heck, his folks were wiring him money to Western Union every month before the war and it isn’t like they’re millionaires.”
Sabrina stopped teasing, and fixed her friend with her tawny stare. Sam and Judy had been bags of bones when they got to Gretsky’s, the dirt and grime of the road was deeply etched into their faces and hands and their eyes were hollow, a haunted by the sights they had seen in the weeks since the war. She had never taken Sam Brenckmann for a one girl, life us do part, sort of guy but him and Judy were so solid she defied anybody to find a chink of light between them. Not that Sam had suddenly turned over a new leaf, he was still the dreamy, out of it kid he was before it was just that now he had Judy; and she just happened to be everything he wanted or needed.
“Stay there,” she commanded. Right from day one Sabrina had documented ‘the history’ of Gretsky’s in pictures. In her paintings and more prosaically, in photographs week in and week out with her trusty Kodak. The morning light in the Canyon was God’s gift to photography and she exploited it whenever the mood took her. In the big, main downstairs room – the ‘living room’ or ‘’party room’ according to mood - of the cut in half mansion old, dog-eared photo albums were stacked on shelves, on the floor, and under tables. Sabrina swept back into the room and circled Judy. Judy hated having her picture taken and pouted. Sometimes, Sabrina respected her feelings, others not. This morning Sabrina gave in, returned huffily to the sofa.
“I found some pictures of Miranda the other day,” Judy said flatly. “Pretty girl.”
“Bitch!” Sabrina snorted.
Judy was more generous. Miranda Sullivan had persuaded an agent in San Francisco to send Sam on a tour of the American North-West with a combo called the Limonville Brothers Strummers Band just before the October War. It was fairly clear that Miranda had done this out of spite, knowing that sooner or later Sam would have a major falling out with the ‘talentless rednecks’ the agent – a man universally despised in Gretsky’s and elsewhere called Johnny Seiffert – and that Sam would therefore soon be joining the ‘untouchables’ black list that every club owner on the West Coast kept behind his bar. However, on the up side, if Miranda, a blond vision of grace and beauty in Sabrina’s photo albums beside whom Judy felt like a middle-aged, dumpy frump, had not attempted to wreak her retribution on Sam by exiling him to ‘the boondocks of the Western World’, she would never have met him, she would almost certainly be dead now, and she certainly would not be heavily pregnant. Therefore, although she probably ought to spit every time she heard the name ‘Miranda’, as was Sabrina’s habit, she simply could not bring herself to do it.
“My husband left me because he thought I couldn’t give him children,” Judy confessed, her brow furrowing as she recollected the unhappy years of her doomed marriage. “Funny, he was the one who couldn’t have kids, not me.” Catching herself growing introspective she brightened. “It’s weird how things turn out, don’t you think?”
Sabrina said nothing.
Judy had written to the local military district in the summer requesting information about the whereabouts and status of her estranged husband. A month ago a letter had come back from the Office of Army Personnel at the Pentagon in Washington DC confirming that ‘acting Master Sergeant Miles Michael Dorfmann, 2nd Armoured Division, United States Forces, Germany, is listed as missing in action and no further information as to his situation or his whereabouts is available at this time.’ The letter had gone on to explain that while it was known that a small number of survivors of US Forces, Germany, had made their way to undamaged areas of France and that a handful had subsequently travelled onwards by land to Spain, or in isolated cases, by boat across the English Channel to the United Kingdom, Judy’s ‘husband’s’ name did not appear on any lists in possession of the Department of Defence. ‘You should not give up hope. The Secretary of Defence wishes his personal thoughts and prayers for the wellbeing of your husband to be communicated to you at this time...’
Which was a big help!
“The way things are I can’t even divorce him,” Judy sighed. “Even though Mickey’s ‘missing’ he still exists as a legal entity for another six or seven years, but I can’t divorce him because I can’t actually serve the papers on him.”
Catch-22!
That was a marvellous title for a book...
Sabrina had a copy of Joseph Heller’s pre-war bestseller and although Judy had not read it – she had had no interest or taste for reading war books before the October War and less now – her friend had read long sections of it aloud and was fond of quoting what she called ‘Yossarian think’ every time another general or admiral came on the TV or the radio whining about the latest defence cuts.
In reflective moments Judy wondered how many thousands of women, and men too, were in her situation? The divorce law and the ‘missing persons’ assumptions within the judicial system remained what it had been before the war; and yet in the meantime the whole World had been turned upside down.
One was tempted to ask what the Federal Government had actually been doing in the last thirteen months except ringing its collective hands!
“Don’t you just love lawyers!” Sabrina empathised with a theatrical flourish.
Chapter 17
Friday 29th November 1963
SUBRON Fifteen Command Compound, Alameda California
Lieutenant Walter Brenckmann had been stowing his gear ahead of his departure for New England when the news had arrived of the shooting in Oakland. About an hour later he had been informed that since he was currently unassigned, having formally handed over his operational responsibilities to his Gold crew counterpart, and having received his orders to ship off the Blue crew of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, he was to take charge of the administration of SUBRON Fifteen’s ‘response’ to the tragic death of the Squadron’s commanding officer and his wife.
That response was ostensibly limited to one of ascertaining the family’s wishes as to the disposal of the body and the treatment of Admiral Braithwaite’s personal effects on Navy property, and reporting back to the Executive Officer of SUBRON Fifteen; which was a problem because he was currently at sea carrying out an operational fitness certification exercise onboard the newest addition to the Squadron, the Lafayette class boat USS Alexander Hamilton (SSBN-617), his duties in turn having devolved to the next most senior o
fficer in the Squadron, Commander Troy Simms of the USS Sam Houston (SSBN-619).
Commander Simms had told Walter that he ‘would deal with the brass and the Navy Department, you just concentrate on finding out what happened to Admiral Braithwaite and keeping his family happy.’ Which suited Walter Brenckmann just fine and confirmed his previous opinion of Troy Simms as a good officer and as ‘the regular guy’ everybody who had ever had anything to do with him had said he was.
The first part of his remit was relatively straightforward; the Navy insisted on a burial with full military ceremony and honours, that went without saying, but the feelings of the Admiral’s wife’s family were to be given due respect, and ideally, the circumstances of the apparently ‘senseless killings’ needed to be resolved for ‘the record’.
It was this second part of his remit that was problematic.
He had spoken over the telephone to Mrs Braithwaite’s next of kin, his younger sister a cultured, patient, tearful, very understanding woman who lived in Virginia, and to Mrs Braithwaite’s attorney, a piece of work who operated out of a high rise in Los Angeles just off Hollywood Boulevard. This individual had spent half-an-hour telling Walter what rights the Navy did, or rather, did not have in determining the form, timing, or general ‘militarization’ of the interment. Fortunately, the wills of the deceased couple were explicit about being buried together, specifying Episcopalian funeral services and their mutual contentment to accept whatever honour the United States Navy wanted to bestow upon one of its most accomplished sons. Moreover, from Walter Brenckmann’s perspective – much to his relief - the Navy side of things was a strictly by the book exercise. Tradition and convoluted written regulations covered every conceivable aspect of the form of the funeral and its surrounding ceremonial. Moreover, the Alameda Naval Air Station Chaplain and the diocese of Oakland were already on the case; his one big outstanding problem was that the Oakland Police Department was also very much on the case of the Sequoyah Road shootings.
Honestly and truly, Walter Brenckmann could not begin to imagine how the detectives he had thus far encountered found their way to work each morning. ‘Dull-witted’, ‘thick-eared’, and ‘stupid’ were much over-used words and descriptions in pulp detective fiction but the officers he had thus far had to deal with were the living embodiment of their B-movie stereotypes. These guys probably had trouble remembering where they lived!
It was for this reason that he had taken the unusual step of formally requesting to speak to the only witness to the murders, a twenty-one year old understandably traumatised waitress who had been on her way to start her late afternoon shift at the Sequoyah Country Club on the afternoon of the killings. There was no way he was prepared to submit a report to the Navy Department for Commander Simms’s signature unless he had acquired at least the outline of a coherent account of what had probably transpired on Sequoyah Avenue.
The Oakland PD had tried to block this meeting. However, Walter Brenckmann was nothing if not resourceful, and very stubborn, he had requested the US Navy’s Liaison Officer at the Governor’s Office in Sacramento for his ‘advice’ as to how to proceed, in the ‘interests of avoiding a Navy-Oakland PD incident’, and this had suddenly opened previously locked doors faster than he had imagined possible.
Walter had been astonished to receive a telephone call three hours later from one of the Governor’s female staffers informing him that the arrangements had been made for him to meet the witness to the shooting. Furthermore, a car would be sent for him to take him to the ‘safe house’ where the young woman was currently being protected by ‘Federal Agents’.
Waiting for the submariner in the back seat of the 1959 Cadillac at the gate to the base was a grim-faced blond whom he guessed was three or four years his junior. There were two FBI men in the front seats. They could only be FBI men because they were dressed in dark suits, white shirts and wearing Homburgs on an unseasonably warm winter morning bathed in glorious sunshine.
“I am Miranda Sullivan,” the woman explained flatly. “We spoke on the phone, Lieutenant Brenckmann. Agent Miller is driving us this morning; Agent Christie will brief you on developments during the journey.”
Agent Christie had a slow, growling delivery and only occasionally looked over his shoulder; mostly his eyes quartered the immediate surroundings of the car and studied other vehicles on the road. He made a short story last a long time.
It seemed that Admiral Braithwaite and his wife were the victims of a ‘professional hit’. The killing had the unmistakable signature of a gangland, mafia-type organised crime assassination. The Admiral’s normal driver had been in the sick bay at the Naval Air Station at the time of the killing, struck down overnight with mystery bout of food poisoning. The man who had driven the commander of SUBRON Fifteen to his early afternoon luncheon appointment with his wife at the Sequoyah Country Club had been added to the car pool roster at Alameda only on the morning of the ‘incident’. Mrs Braithwaite had spent the morning playing a round of golf with girlfriends and met her husband in the clubhouse restaurant shortly after one o’clock. The Admiral’s driver had killed time with the other drivers while the Braithwaites enjoyed their lunch. Then, at around two-twenty, the couple had left the clubhouse. Although the Braithwaites often lunched at the club, Mrs Braithwaite usually drove separately to the club but it so happened that her Dodge was off the road with a carburetor problem. It was likely that Admiral Braithwaite planned to drop his wife off in Oakland where she intended to meet a friend for coffee that afternoon.
But that was not to be.
Agent Christie was excoriating when he got to what he thought of the Oakland Police Department’s handling of the case in the critical twenty four hours after the killing. Basically, a troop of chimpanzees wearing blindfolds could not have done a worse job preserving the crime scene, and could not have possibly been any more ham-fisted in their treatment of the only witness to the crime. In fact, a troop of blind chimpanzees would probably have been more effective keeping passersby and pressmen from trampling over, around, and peering into the said crime scene.
Miranda Sullivan eventually felt moved to intervene.
“The Oakland PD did not know what they were dealing with initially,” she explained with a weary sigh that indicated that she had had to deal with both the Oakland PD and the FBI in the last few days. “The only witness was hysterical and a large number of members of the public and other drivers had stopped to attempt to be of assistance to the victims before the first Oakland PD cruiser got to the scene. The first ambulance arrived soon afterwards. People around here aren’t used to this sort of gruesome gangland style killing. While Agent Christie and his colleagues have, no doubt, much greater experience of these things the Governor and the Mayor of Oakland categorically reject the unfair characterization of the response of the Oakland PD which you have just heard. That said the Mayor of Oakland has expressed his regret that the Oakland PD was not more forthcoming in their dealings with the US Navy in the first forty-eight hours after the death of Admiral Braithwaite.”
Walter Brenckmann was diplomacy personified.
“The Navy completely understands the difficulties of the civilian authorities in situations such as these, Miss Sullivan. My only interest in the conduct of the investigation into the murders is to be able to accurately report back to my superiors as to the current progress of the investigation, and to do whatever needs to be done to finalize the arrangements for the funeral of my former commanding officer and his wife with all appropriate dignity, military honours and ceremony.”
Walter decided to make no comment on the involvement of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. If he had known the FBI were running the show earlier that day he would have backed off, handed matters over to the US Navy’s own Special Investigations Branch.
Too late for that now!
Darlene Lefebure was being accommodated in a house in Berkeley within ten minutes walk of the main University campus. The young woman was in an upstairs room an
d was brought down, under armed escort, after a delay of some ten minutes while Walter Brenckmann and Miranda Sullivan kicked their heels in the back lobby of the building. Two Agents patrolled the grounds of the house, which was set back about twenty yards from the main thoroughfare.
Walter Brenckmann became aware that Miranda Sullivan was giving him an uneasy, very thoughtful look.
“Forgive me, Lieutenant. Brenckmann isn’t a common name. I was acquainted with a Sam Brenckmann once and I recollect he mentioned that he had a brother in the Navy?” The woman half-asked, half-stated without warning. There was a nervous anxiety in her tone which the naval officer, still a little lost in his own ruminations at that moment missed.
Walter grinned ruefully.
“Yes.” Since he was not at liberty to confide in Miranda Sullivan that he had just returned from a patrol on a Polaris boat, what he said next was hedged around with small, relatively harmless white lies. “Sam was somewhere down in LA the last we heard. He wrote a letter to Ma, that was a couple of months back. Sam being Sam he could be anywhere now.”
Miranda stared at the dapper, neatly turned out young officer like he had said something unbelievable crass. Upon learning that her Navy contact at Alameda was a Lieutenant Brenckmann she had thought; ‘no, that can’t be?’ Sure, ‘Brenckmann’ was not exactly a commonplace name but even so, that was too much of a surreal coincidence. This guy could not be Sam’s big brother. Then, on first sight she had breathed a huge sigh of relief because in appearance he had not looked remotely like Sam. Sam was a bigger, rangier man; this guy was of barely average height, the uniform suited him, and he was, well, so completely unlike Sam that she had almost but not quite convinced herself that he was not the man she had known in her heart that he had to be.