by Farris, John
"Let's not talk about it now," I said. But he hadn't asked my opinion; he hadn't left room for discussion. That was Dev's way.
Dec. 21
I'd been putting off a call to Felice most of the day, trying to think of something to tell her that might sound halfway encouraging.
About four the doorbell rang and there was Sam Holland, smiling calmly at me. He was still pitifully thin but he had a good tan and his eyes were clear. I invited him in and then gave him hell. He was genuinely appalled to learn how much trouble he'd been causing. He hadn't disappeared, he said. Didn't Dev and I get his thank-you note? Hadn't Felice received the letter he'd written her? He'd entrusted both letters to the proprietor of a motel in Indio, where he stayed one night during his wanderings. That explained a lot, but not everything. I hauled him into the bedroom, put the telephone in his hands and shut the door.
Twenty minutes later he emerged looking subdued and chastened. "Everything's all right," he said. "I think." We had drinks and Sam told me about the trip he'd taken. After four days of lazing around Big Sur he was much improved but still in no mood to make those half-dozen speeches he'd been booked for. So he begged off and drove over to the San Joaquin Valley to see how things were currently going for the migrant farm workers, do some interviewing for a possible article. Then he continued as far south as Mexico before doubling back and showing up here.
Sam arranged to catch an eight-thirty flight out of Oakland AP and I got cracking in the kitchen to fix supper for everybody. Dev came. As usual, he and Sam were up to their ears in profound conversation five seconds after they said hello. They raked over the breakup of the hippie community in Haight-Ashbury, (Dev claimed public hostility had a lot to do with it, but he admitted that hippie communities are by nature volatile and unstable, and indiscriminate use of certain drugs intensifies the pressure-cooker atmosphere of violence and self-destruction. That got them onto the possibility of a viable drug subculture. Sam brought up LSD. Dev, who used it extensively for several months (before I met him), argued LSD's value in unlocking human potential is exaggerated. Dev contended that the real hope for humanity lies in Esalen-style encounter-group meetings. (There we're in complete argument. We've both been to Esalen, but separately. I felt like a big pussycat for weeks after, brimming over with potential and good fellowship, but everyday living gradually turned me into an aspirin-swallowing neurotic again.)
Dec. 28
Christmas was cozy and fun. Dev left yesterday to spend a couple of days with his family. I could have gone along, but only his sister, who is a doll, really accepts me; the usual ethnic thing and we just have to get used to it, I suppose. Anyway I had much work to do on two longish papers, due the end of Jan.
Came back from the library and found this rather dog-eared Santa Claus card tacked to the front door. It said: Hi, remember me? If you get bored during the break give me a call. It was signed Lone. Well, I almost did call her but decided against it, and felt like a rat. She must be lonely and apparently she digs me, harmlessly. I don't know. I just have too much else to cope with right now.
Jan. 5
Hard to find the time anymore to add anything to this misbegotten journal. I haven't written a decent poem for weeks. Everything comes out sour and neurotic. (I'm using that word too much lately.)
Dev and I are on the verge of having a Big One, which is all I need to go with premenstrual tension. He is taking no pains to disguise his dissatisfaction with nearly everything. There is no integrity in science anymore. To be free, to hold onto his own integrity in a valueless society, he has to find a way out of his personal prison. He is going to paint. Maybe he'll be a lousy painter, he tells me (if I could just get him out of the habit of pacing while he's talking to me I'd be a contented woman), but the important thing is to quickly break with what you find destructive in life and clean out your mind, live truthfully, create hopefully.
"I think we need at least a year," he said. "Maybe it'll take three years, who knows? In Europe, preferably a country where we don't know the language, can't read the papers. We'll live as simply as we know how."
The awful hell of it is, I can't argue with him. Because I know how intensely he is suffering from his disaffection, and how certain he is that he's found the cure-all at last. But I'm saddened because I can't share his—I was going to write enthusiasm, but it isn't that. Just a bleak determination to turn everything upside down, empty his life, fill it up again—with something. Painting, this time. And this time, unlike the other times, will he fill his life completely?
This is what keeps me awake at night. How are we going to be fulfilled, Dev? By living in a place where we don't speak the language—even to each other?
Chapter Eight
Saturday, June 29
General Henry Phelan Morse came in out of the wretched night and paused in the lobby of the police building, which was no more than a new wing of the long-standing Colonial village hall. He nodded to the officer who was on duty in a glassed cubicle with the dispatcher opposite him. The General pulled off his hat and let it drain. Then he continued grimly down a wide corridor, listing badly over a black and thorny-looking cane.
Near the end of the hall he opened a door marked “Interrogation” and went in.
Ordinarily the fourteen-foot-square room had only a metal table with a gray top and four wooden chairs in it. But the room had been turned into a crowded command center for the investigation of the kidnapping of Carol Watterson. There were detailed maps on the walls, four telephones, police radio equipment, a teletype, a slide projector and screen, a chalkboard and an artist's layout board.
There were two men in the room, both using telephones. Peter Demilia glanced at the General and raised an eyebrow and went on talking. After hanging up the receiver he jotted a couple of notes on a pad.
The General said, "Where's Gaffney?"
Demilia pointed to the phone. "I was just talking to him, General. He's in Kingston."
"Anything in that Volkswagen van?"
"Enough to keep the mobile lab crew working for a couple of days."
"But there's no evidence yet that Carol was taken in that particular van."
Demilia looked sleepily at him. "Whoever drove it last cleaned it up pretty good afterward. But short of steam-cleaning and sandblasting you couldn't possibly remove all evidence of use and occupation. The lab boys have found detergent, soil samples, traces of vomit, hairs, a scrap of human skin. There are fragmentary fingerprints and one good palm print. I suppose altogether they lifted a couple of hundred latents. Maybe one of them will be helpful." He hesitated, then said, "The best clue so far is a few flecks of yellow paint in the treads of three of the four tires on the van. The paint is the type used for warning stripes on the highways in this state, and for marking off restricted and parking areas."
"Fresh paint?"
"Only a few days old, they say. We're still checking state and county maintenance departments here, in Jersey and in Connecticut. Twelve miles of route two-ten west of Stony Point, over in Rockland County, were striped on Monday."
"I assume Gaffney is bringing the owner of the truck rental down to look at the man you picked up this morning."
"No reason, General. Our Mr. Flicker has proved to everyone's satisfaction that he was busy writing bad checks in Louisville until Tuesday of this week. The bus driver who brought him East remembered him only too well. Flicker talked nonstop about inventions he was going to invent and books he was going to write. Outside of the hippie hair there's no great resemblance between Flicker and the man who chose to call himself Homer Sewell of Barstow, Tennessee."
"There's no Homer Sewell?"
"And no Barstow, Tennessee. About a thousand blank State of Tennessee drivers' licenses were stolen eight months ago from their Department of Public Safety. Now we know where one of those licenses ended up." Demilia rubbed the back of his neck. "Still lousy out, General? How about some coffee?"
"Thanks," the General said, and limped across the room
to study a map of Orange and Rockland Counties. The teletype woke up, hammered out a message, fell silent. Demilia poured coffee into a plastic-coated cup and added two cubes of sugar: he knew the General's habits well by now.
The General took his coffee without looking away from the map. "Six goddam days," he said. Demilia noted undertones of desperation and panic in his voice.
"We've had good breaks so far," the detective said mildly. They had sifted through the credit card receipts at the Esso station in Fox Village, then called on a couple dozen people in two states. A family of seven in a ranch wagon had stopped about five on Sunday for gas and restrooms. Patient questioning of the five children had resulted in their first break. A twelve-year-old girl had been sulking alone in the back of the wagon, facing Jake's for Steak. She had seen an older girl in a cute tennis outfit stagger and collapse as if fainting. A tall, bushy-haired man had helped her into a black delivery van. They were both half concealed behind some kind of sports car with the hood up. The truck had been a Yolks, the witness was positive about that, because her Uncle Sherm, who was a florist, had recently bought one like it, only red. The van drove away fast, then turned south on the Saw Mill. The witness hadn't noticed the driver. The whole thing looked funny to her because the man just sort of threw the girl into the back of the van. But she hadn't said a word about what she'd seen because she was so mad at her parents.
Two hours after the APB for a black Volkswagen van two Columbia County sheriff's deputies spotted one on a run-down riverfront street just outside the city limits of Hudson, New York. They checked it out routinely. The keys were in the ignition.
The van was staked out by police and FBI for twenty-four hours. In that time no one went near it. They learned, meanwhile, that it had been rented for two weeks. Homer Sewell of Barstow, Tennessee, had paid a cash deposit.
After a full day it was concluded that the van had been abandoned; it was then taken to a police garage for examination.
The General stared at the map for a long time, letting his coffee grow cold. His shoulders had rounded.
"Two-ten west," he said finally. "That runs straight through Harriman State Park and Sterling Forest. Isolated areas, nothing but hiking trails."
"Yeah," Demilia affirmed, knowing what he was getting at.
"It went wrong," the General said reluctantly. "The only thing I didn't count on. If they'd planned to kill her in the first place they would have called and tried to collect their money. No, it went wrong somehow, and Carol's dead." He was rigid, face flushed here and waxen there, like the work of a bad mortician. Only the eyes were fervently alive. "Bear Mountain, Harriman. That's where you ought to be looking. By God, they killed her—" He broke off, still staring, and now there were tears of outrage in his eyes.
Demilia shook his head slowly. "There's a chance, General."
"By God," the old man groaned, "you find them! You'd better do it goddam fast or I'll be out looking too, and if I get to them first you won't have anything to bring in! I'll cut them up in chunks for my birds."
"Yes, sir." Lieutenant Demilia, despite the fact that he'd been a cop for a good while and had heard all kinds of threats, was rather impressed. This wasn't just a scared old man talking tough. The General, for a man of seventy or so, had plenty of iron left in him. He looked as if he could handle himself well in a scrap, even with one leg off at the knee. . . . "Yes, sir, General," Demilia said again, restively, when it seemed as if the General had locked his bitter, tearful gaze onto him for the remainder of the night.
The General shook himself, blinked, and for a few moments he looked dazed and unaware of his surroundings. Then he put on his hat and reached for the formidable cane.
"I want to be notified," he said sternly, "as soon as there are developments. Don't forget that, Lieutenant. Don't anybody here forget it."
"I won't sir," Demilia promised, and although he'd been out of the Army for a decade, he was powerfully seized by an urge to salute as the General turned away.
Chapter Nine
Feb. 16—April 5, 1968
CAROL’S BOOK
Along about two in the morning there was another squall of rain, with wind and sharp thunder that jolted the solid old Colonial house.
Felice scarcely noticed; she looked up only twice from the last pages of Carol's handwritten journal. These pages were about her increasingly sad and troubled days after the breakup with Dev. And she had written often about Sam.
Feb. 16
Dev has been gone for five days.
It isn't any good remaining here, I know that now. I thought I could tough it out in the apartment until graduation, but I feel like I've overstayed at a funeral. Last night I woke up half a dozen times, and the last time I was sobbing so hard they must have heard me in the street. So I'm going to move. It shouldn't be hard subletting right now. Beth knows a couple who are looking. They can have this place today if they want it. Just give me time to pack.
The problem is finding a place to lay my head for the next three or four months. I could move in with Lone, of course. She has room and I know she'd be delighted. Yesterday when I ran into her at Dwinelle Hall she dropped a couple of hints hard enough to break my toes. But I don't think so. In her brighter moods Lone is good company. But she has more than her share of quirks and fetishes I find hard to condone and impossible to live with. I think she honestly tries, but she can't seem to get along without pills of some kind. Amphetamines, probably, or amyl nitrate. I hope not. She is a strangely endearing, impulsive person, so I suppose it was inevitable we'd become friends. The last couple of weeks she's been especially solicitous and helpful without being too pushy.
Still, I couldn't. I just couldn't share living space with Lone Kels. Like so many women who are basically carnal, she's on the slovenly side, and the drug-oriented can't be bothered with mundane housekeeping. She does keep herself clean, but I'm sure I would take on the role of Keeper and Lone's not that domesticated, so, inevitably, we'd be at each other's throats. I'd have to keep my guard up and the whip cracking, particularly when the boyfriends, the tough, scarred, promiscuous cats, came prowling around. And I'm not in a whip-cracking mood. I just want to leave alone, be left alone.
So I'll accept Gary and Beth's offer, that dark, little eight-by-eight room. With both of them teaching and working on their doctorates I doubt if they spend more than four hours a day in their pad during the week. And there's not the remotest chance Gary will take a hack at me if we happen to find ourselves alone. His only vices are an occasional lid of Acapulco Gold when the budget allows and the, ugh, National Enquirer.
Feb. 25
I've got the deep blue sinks. I don't want to write, talk, eat, sleep, or go out. I just sit here. And I hate myself. And I want to be with Dev, with Dev. Oh, God!
Mar. 14
Sam couldn't have called at a worse time. I had just climbed up out of the blue sinks for about the tenth time, but the latest effort left me exhausted and indifferent. Yesterday Beth went to a great deal of trouble to cook her ragout, which ordinarily I can't get enough of, but it was an ordeal just to eat it and say the proper things. I guess I wasn't convincing in my enthusiasm because I could tell Beth was disappointed and hurt. I could have cut out my tongue for hurting Beth's feelings. I'm no good for anybody these days. I know I shouldn't have moved in with the Liskas. I thought I was a hardy no-nonsense type—broken romance, so what? A few tears, a few bad moments, he's forgotten.
It's torture. It is pure hell. He is not forgotten. I don't think I will ever forget Dev. Or stop hurting in this god-awful cancerous way.
I didn't want to put Sam out but he had the whole day on his hands and he insisted on driving over and yanking me out of my fouled little nest. Bless Sam Holland. It turned out to be a marvelous day, more summer than spring, with that breathtaking clarity which we have all too seldom in the Bay Area.
We drove north through the grape-growing, wine-making counties and had a long, splendid lunch at a little restaurant I'd hear
d about, near Santa Rosa.
Sam was chipper and looked fit. He'd even put on a few pounds. He very tactfully didn't remark on my appearance. I hadn't seen him since before Christmas, during his own personal dog days, but he'd been to the Coast frequently during the past three months, and had dutifully called from the airport each time.
We split a bottle of claret with our smorgasbord, which loosened my tongue slightly too much, and I held forth for the better part of a half hour, a syrupy monologue about Dev and how I missed him and how it was for the best after all, and when I started hiccupping in a silly, grief-stricken way (hiccups, apparently, are my acne, my buck teeth, my stigmata), I had to beat it to the ladies' room to cry and wash my face. But I have to admit it did me a heck of a lot of good. And Sam didn't seem any the worse for wear when I reappeared.
He was less eager to talk about his difficulties with Felice. He frowned when I prodded, and hemmed and hawed and allowed that they were making progress, but communication was a difficult thing all of a sudden, and, well, they'd just have to see. I let it go at that.
Sam had a surprise for me, which he saved for dessert. During the past week he'd had lunch with his editor to discuss the new book Sam was going to write. Somehow the subject got around to me and my craving to find a niche in the literary world. Two days later the editor called and told Sam that his house would have a place for me, as an editorial assistant, come September. I didn't know what an editorial assistant was, but I pretended I did. Sam's publisher is one of the oldest and most respected in the business and their lists are crammed with famous names, so it should be fascinating.
We drove south toward Mann and the Golden Gate Bridge; then, because it was that kind of day, we decided on the spur of the moment to go up to the summit of Tamalpais.