The Search for Maggie Ward

by Andrew M. Greeley

  And if Allen Ward was still alive, if he was making money again in the first bloom of postwar prosperity, how would he find his daughter? Assuming that he still cared about finding her.

  If he was alive—and Maggie’s instincts said that he was—he certainly still cared.

  I lugged my duffel to the office of the NAS commandant and “reported” in.

  “Like the jet, Jerry?” My first air-group boss grinned at me—coming out into the anteroom to shake my hand. “Want one for yourself?”

  “When there’s one with four engines, with enough room to breathe.” I laughed back. “I’m not Navy, Tom, you know that.”

  “I sure as hell can’t see you going to the Academy,” he agreed. “Enjoy yourself while you’re here.”

  Damn right he couldn’t see me as a plebe at the Academy. I had little toleration for Fascism. It’s a miracle I made it through preflight at Iowa City.

  The skipper found a launch that was going across the bay to the mainland. After the long wait in the parking lot at Lindbergh Field, opposite the Naval Air Station, Roxinante was most reluctant to be called back into service. After considerable persuasion, she finally rumbled back into life. I collected some of my clothes from the BOQ and took the ferry over to Coronado Island. After the sweltering heat of Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Florida during the past three weeks, the alluring softness of late afternoon in southern California was like a comfortable bed with clean sheets in an air-conditioned hotel room—with a lovely maiden to caress your forehead and sing you to sleep in bed with you.

  So much for fantasies, I told myself.

  The Del Coronado, a great domed Victorian heap, stood at the edge of the beach, resplendent in its new coat of paint, a dowager with a new dress (even today it is still listed in the top twenty “charm” hotels of the world). It would be, I ignored my own prohibition of fantasies, a great place for a honeymoon.

  I checked in, dumped my new supply of clothes in my room, and rushed for the ocean. Its warm, soothing salt tang revived me. Yesterday the Atlantic, today the Pacific, an easy achievement for the jet age. The cobwebs from the flight exorcised from my head by my swim, I donned my most-expensive-looking sport jacket and slacks and drifted casually down to the manager’s office. After a few moments of Irish charm, hinting at great resources of wealth lurking somewhere in Chicago real estate, we were talking like long-lost friends about the wonders of the jet age.

  He pretended to remember me from my previous times at the hotel—a major accomplishment, since I had never stayed there before. (Although I had on more than one occasion consumed a few quick ones in their bar.)

  Almost indifferently, a bothersome request from my mother, to tell the truth, I inquired about a young woman who might have worked there during the last year, year and a half, a certain Margaret Ward.

  “Yes, indeed.” He smoothed his long, sleek black hair. “I remember the poor child well. She was a very likable kid. Came here … let me see … I should think about February of 1945, just a year and a half ago. We needed waitresses then because so many women were working in the war-production factories. She had no experience, none whatever, but there was something about her that made you want to give her a chance. She was intelligent and hardworking and very quickly became one of our most efficient service staff. Even when her, ah, condition became obvious, we kept her on as long as we could as a maid.”

  “Till late April, I presume.”

  “More like late May. We, uh, stretched a point in retaining her as long as we did because everyone was so fond of her.” He shook his head. “I suspect she was below the legal working age too. Not, alas, beneath the age where she could be forced to marry some pig of a sailor.… Sorry, Commander.”

  San Diego at that time hated Navy almost as much as they hated Mexicans. Ironically, the navy people who settled there after the war became indistinguishable from the natives in their conservatism—and their hatred for Mexicans.

  “Forget it.” I waved off his embarrassment. “Let’s stipulate that he was a pig before he entered the Navy. So that was the last you saw of her.”

  “No.” He frowned. “She came back just a few months ago, a rather pathetic little waif. Let me check.…” He opened a record book and flipped through the pages. “It was the first week of April. She said that she had lost both her husband and her child. We simply had no room for her then. She seemed so worn and discouraged that I did offer to try to find her a position somewhere else and urged her to call me back in a couple of days.”

  “Were you able to find her a job?” My heart was pounding again. This might be the key that opened a lot of doors.

  “As a matter of fact, I was. My friend, the manager of the Beverly Hills Hotel, was looking for a superior hostess for the Polo Lounge. Margaret would have been excellent. But she never called back.”

  “I see.”

  “It was”—he closed the book gently—”very difficult not to like her. So young and yet so poised and determined.”

  “So my mother said. Well, sir, I’ll report home.” I rose and shook hands with him. “I suppose she’ll turn up. Thank you.”

  “Not at all, Commander. Do enjoy your stay. We are proud of the new Del Coronado.”

  “With reason.”

  He had been kind to my Maggie, so I forgave him for his slurs on the Navy. The San Diego locals doubtless had grounds for complaint. Hundreds of thousands of young men, about to go to war or returning from war, had invaded and on occasion seemed about to destroy their sleepy little paradise. They were much less of a threat to San Diego, however, than a Japanese carrier task force sitting two hundred miles off the coast would have been. The link between the presence of our Navy and the absence of theirs seemed to escape most of the local citizenry.

  Better, I thought as I walked slowly back to my room, a hundred American air-crew drunks in your bar (and an occasional light drinker like me) than a like number of Japanese flyers yelling for sake and waving their swords.

  I used a sheet of Del Coronado stationery for my notes; one does not write an unprepared entry into one’s journal if one can help it!

  1) January 1945. Philadelphia. Margaret Mary Ward and Andrew John Koenig are wed in a shotgun marriage in Saint Dominic’s parish. Perhaps she is two months pregnant.

  2) February 1945. San Diego. Margaret Ward (still using her maiden name) starts work as a waitress at the Del Coronado. When her pregnancy becomes too obvious, she is shifted to the back stairs and works as a maid. Leaves the Del Coronado in May. Her husband is at sea, probably at Ulithi. Possibly brought there by the Indianapolis.

  3) August 1945. San Diego. Their daughter Andrea is born, probably early in the month. Andrew is most likely still in the western Pacific.

  4) Between August and Christmas 1945. San Diego. Andrea dies. It is unclear whether her husband has returned. Probably he has.

  (The most powerful military force the world has ever known virtually demobilized itself after the war. “The conflict is over, why aren’t we going home,” was the protest heard round the world. The government wisely sent us home as quickly as it could lest we mutiny and turn the world back to our former enemies. Those conservative historians who argue that Roosevelt demobilized rapidly as an excuse not to fight the Russians either were not around or cannot remember the riots of GIs demanding to be sent home.)

  5) Between Christmas and March 1946. Possibly in San Diego, though that is not certain, Andrew Koenig dies.

  6) April 1946. San Diego. Margaret Ward returns to Del Coronado, seeking her old job. Seems terribly depressed. Job is not available, but manager offers to find her another and asks her to call back.

  7) July 22, 1946. Tucson. I meet Andrea King, as she is calling herself now, in the railway station. She tells me the next day that she is already damned, caught between earth and hell, and that she has committed unpardonable sins.

  8) July 27, 1946. Superstition Mountains. She disappears after bizarre experience in ghost town.

  I
pondered this chronology.

  There were two missing pieces that seemed to be important.

  a) Where was she in the four months between her search for a job here and my meeting with her in Tucson?

  b) When and how did her husband die?

  There were, I told myself, answers to both questions and I would find them.

  I did find them in the next two days. I wouldn’t like either one of the answers. Not at all.

  CHAPTER 26

  THE BUILDING THAT HOUSED THE SAN DIEGO UNION-Ledger in 1946 was as fusty and depressing in those days as the paper was, is, and, barring a miraculous intervention from extraterrestrials or the Deity, always will be.

  They did have a public service bureau of a sort in a windowless room on the second floor. A woman librarian who was ancient enough to have come to California with John Charles Frémont, would, after complaint and negotiation, reluctantly permit you to read back issues, but only after you swore solemnly that you would not cut any articles out of the paper.

  “We’ll call the police,” she warned, “if I see you so much as use a pencil to mark the paper. Vandalism must be stopped.”

  I endorsed this position enthusiastically and, having signed a document listing my addresses and bank-account numbers, retired to an even dingier corner where, under the light provided by a single 40-watt bulb, I began to read systematically the news of San Diego from December 15, 1945, to March 15, 1946.

  The late President Roosevelt was very dead, but not forgotten. The Union insisted that he had staged the Pearl Harbor defeat to trick us into the war on England’s side. It would have been a major achievement, I thought, for FDR to have so exploited the Japanese High Command.

  It made me feel that I was back in Chicago reading Colonel Robert McCormick’s Tribune, except that the Union-Ledger lacked the Colonel’s madcap, solipsistic flair. It never hinted that its publisher won the First World War.

  Four hours of reading old newspapers has the same effect on your sensitivities that retreat masters used to suggest cold showers would have on your “concupiscence” (an effect which in my case has never occurred): you begin to feel that if you read one more headline you will become a permanent zombie, capable of thinking and talking only in newspeak.

  So I turned the page in the March 14 issue after glancing at the headline. And then turned another page. A tiny jab at the back of my brain suggested I had missed something important. I reread the last page. Nothing there.

  Then the one before. This time the headline jumped off the page at me:

  Wife Kills Sailor in Dispute over Dead Child

  My fingers trembled. My stomach knotted. I did not want to read the story—halfway down the fifth page. Navy events were rarely front-page news now in the Union-Ledger.

  Last night, police charged Margaret M. Koenig, 18, with the murder of her husband Andrew J. Koenig, 20, a radar technician assigned to the San Diego Navy Yard.

  Koenig either fell or was pushed from the window of their third floor apartment at 1225 Chatsworth Boulevard

  According to Lieutenant Wayne Manzell of the San Diego Police homicide unit, Koenig and his wife had been fighting about the death of their four-month-old daughter Andrea, who was found dead in her crib last December 20. Neighbors, Manzell said, reported that Koenig blamed his wife for the death of the child.

  “The first death looked kind of fishy,” Manzell told the Union-Ledger, “but there was not enough evidence to justify a charge. This time we have a clear case of the woman shoving the sailor out of the window of their third-floor apartment over there in the Gateway district where all the navy people live.”

  According to Manzell, neighbors also said that Koenig had been drinking heavily since the death of his daughter. “His body smelled,” Manzell said. “He was pretty well oiled last night when she pushed him out the window.”

  Margaret is being held without bail.

  I leaned back on my hard wooden chair and closed my eyes. Maggie wouldn’t hurt anyone, they had said in Philadelphia. Yet she had pushed her husband out of a third-story window.

  Possibly drunken husband.

  Held without bail.

  I would race over to the courthouse and bail her out.

  CIC reappeared, on schedule: “Wake up, dopey, she’s out of jail. That was months ago.”

  “Are you all right, young man?” The forty-niner woman was leaning over me solicitously. A nice old lady despite her fustiness.

  “Fine, thank you, ma’am.” I opened my eyes and tried to smile up at her. “I’m resting my eyes after reading all these papers.”

  “Take good care of your eyes, young man, they’re the only ones you have.”

  It is apparently a timeless proverb among the maternal half of the species. I’ve heard my wife use it often with our children. And now our daughters use it with their children.

  “I sure will. Thank you.”

  I looked at the paper again. There was a picture of a young woman next to the story. Maggie, I supposed. If I had not noticed the headline I’d never recognize her. What had they done to her in prison?

  I’d better get over there and bail her out before they did worse.

  No, this is not Maggie since I’d seen her. It was Maggie before I’d met her.

  I pulled my wits together. Maggie had been out of jail by early April at the latest because she had applied for a job at the Del Coronado. And the manager had not mentioned anything about murder charges. If he knew about them he would certainly have told me. But all he said was that her husband had died. Apparently the case had not made a big impact on San Diego. What difference did the death of one more sailor make in this city?

  Thus reassured, I carefully worked my way through the Union-Ledger for the rest of March.

  There was no further mention of the Koenig murder.

  In Chicago the case would have been front-page news with pictures, interviews with neighbors, biographies of both participants, and breathless day-by-day coverage. But the Union-Ledger was fusty and dull, and uninterested in sailors and their families.

  Their prejudice had made the ordeal easier for Maggie.

  I drove back to the ferry and called my father from the Del Coronado. Without asking why, he assured me that he would call in an owed favor or two in the San Diego municipal administration.

  So the next day I was sitting in the office of Lieutenant Wayne C. Manzell of the homicide squad of the San Diego Police Department. The central police headquarters in San Diego is built in California mission style—white stone building with a courtyard in the middle. Manzell’s office faced the courtyard. Like all cop offices, the windows had not been washed for five centuries, the furniture had been salvaged from the last encampment of Attila the Hun, and the smell suggested that the men’s room was next door, which it wasn’t.

  Adding to the stench was the aroma of Lieutenant Manzell’s stogie, which could not have cost him even five cents.

  Prewar.

  Manzell himself looked like the caricature of a Southern sheriff that would emerge in films of the fifties and sixties—a fat, bald, heavily jowled man who opened his mouth only to remove the cigar so he could spit.

  He was polite enough to me, although his indifference to the “Koenig case” implied that I had disturbed a day that otherwise would have been devoted to thoughtful meditation, eyes closed, in the peace of his office.

  “Yeah, I thought we had a sure murder-one conviction.” He tossed the file contemptuously on his desk and placed his enormous shoes on top of it, as if to hold it down in a breeze.

  There was no breeze because the windows were not opened and probably could not be opened. Your police windows installed five centuries ago are not designed to be opened.

  “What went wrong?” I tried to sound sympathetic.

  “Goddamn young DA couldn’t see it. I says, she pushed him out the window. He says that there are witnesses from the adjoining apartments”—he pulled the file out from under his feet—”fucking CPO named
Fred Weaver and his wife Magda who are willing to swear that he was drunk and beating her. Got drunk and beat her every night. Bitch deserved it, I says.”

  “Oh?”

  “Hell, she killed the little kid too. Smothered it. Couldn’t prove it. Never can prove those child-murder cases unless there are black and blue marks on the fucking kid, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, this Weaver couple and some of the other sailors in the building—that’s all you got over there, you know”—he belched heavily—”fucking sailors and fucking marines—say he was shouting so everyone in the building could hear him that he was going to throw her out the window. Fucking marine coming in the front door—wooden building with paper-thin walls, you know what kind of shit the fucking Navy lives in—says that he saw him with his hands around her throat, shoving her out the window. She knees him in the gut and slips away, he loses his balance, and over he goes. A witness like that, says the young DA, and you’re not even going to get a manslaughter conviction, not even when the defendant is Navy. Huh?”

  “You disagreed?”

  “Shit, it’s no skin off my ass if another fucking sailor bounces his head on concrete. Funny thing, if he had killed her, we would have had an airtight case against him. Huh?”

  “Yeah. Weird.”

  “Sure is. Anyway, the kid DA says that with witnesses like that we shouldn’t even have brought the charges. I don’t know what’s wrong with kids these days. The war, I suppose. But since when doesn’t a young DA want a murder-one charge. I think he has the hots for the little bitch.”

  “Cute?”

  “Not as far as I noticed.” He shrugged his massive shoulders. “Nice tits, if you like that sort of thing. You know what I mean, the kind you like to squeeze real hard till they scream, then a little harder so they’ll remember you for a week. Huh?”