by Janet Dawson
He disappeared into the house while I chatted with Mrs. Torres, then returned a few moments later and stepped out onto the porch, carrying a business card. “Found it right away,” he said. “Here’s his work address and phone number, and that number written on the back is a cell phone number. Now, he gave me this card several years ago, when we bought the house. So I don’t know if any of this information is current. I’d guess he’s in his early sixties, probably still working.”
“It’s helpful, and a place to start.” I jotted down the information. Joel Corwin worked for Wells Fargo Bank, at their offices in the San Francisco Financial District. Maybe he was still there, and if he wasn’t I could get a lead on his whereabouts. I thanked Mr. and Mrs. Torres and gave Patch one last ear scratch. Then I headed for my car, where I took out my cell phone and punched in Joel Corwin’s cell phone number. I got voice mail, no name, just a recording advising me to leave a message of my own. So I did. Then I started my car and headed home.
* * *
Pearl’s photograph, an eight-by-ten-inch color glossy, arrived in Wednesday’s mail. Ed Asner, who played the lead role of the crusty Los Angeles newspaper editor in the television series Lou Grant, was in the foreground of the picture. To his right was a younger version of Pearl Bishop, in a tailored business suit. Both had smiles on their faces as they talked. It looked as though they were sharing a joke. At the top of the photo Asner had scrawled a short note to Pearl and signed his name. To Asner’s left, in the background, was actress Nancy Marchand, playing the newspaper publisher. She stood at the driver’s-side door of a car. With her was a short man wearing nondescript clothes, the bit player as parking attendant. He held a set of car keys over her palm. I could see most of his face, but the image was small.
I took my digital camera from a drawer and used it to photograph the face in the picture, zooming in as much as I could. Then I uploaded the photo to my computer and enlarged it. The result was grainy and slightly blurred but I could see the man’s face clearly enough. I opened the digital photo of Henry Calhoun, taken while he and Chaz Makellar unloaded the SUV in front of the shop. I arranged the photos so they were side by side on the screen. Thirty years separated the images and Calhoun was in his eighties. Was he also the anonymous-looking man, middle-aged and ordinary, in Pearl’s photo? There was a resemblance, but it was slight. Because of the age difference, I couldn’t be sure.
Pearl said Binky Jasper was a chameleon, taking on the coloration of his surroundings. I wouldn’t have given the man in the photo a second glance, unless I had a reason to do so.
After Pearl’s phone call on Monday I had done some online research about Hank Calvin, the name Pearl said the actor had been using when he’d played the parking attendant in that episode of Lou Grant. I saw a list of credits that encompassed thirty-five years, starting in 1946, the year after World War II ended, and extending to 1981. In the forties and fifties it was mostly movie work. I’d even heard of some of the films, a couple of fifties noir movies directed by Samuel Fuller, and the rousing Western The Jayhawkers, starring Jeff Chandler and Fess Parker. From the early sixties on, Calvin’s credits were primarily television work, episodes of long-ago shows like Gunsmoke, The Big Valley, Mannix, and Dallas. Sometimes the character he was playing had a name, but at other times he was identified merely as janitor, clerk, mailman, bartender, farmhand, or simply “(uncredited) bit part.” It looked as though Calvin had worked steadily enough to earn a living at it.
Then he’d stopped working in movies and television. I wondered why. If Pearl was mistaken, and Hank Calvin was not Binky Jasper, maybe Calvin had retired, or died. If he was Binky, maybe he’d taken on another persona. I looked at the photos again. From Calvin to Calhoun wasn’t that big a stretch. Maybe Binky was Henry.
I called Liam Cleary’s cell phone number. When he answered, I asked if he could talk and he said, “Sure, I’m in my office doing paperwork. Any excuse for a break. What’s up, darlin’?”
“When I was in LA two weeks ago, looking at the Tarrant file, you said you’d check to see if Henry Calhoun had ever come up on the radar down there. Anything come up?”
“Not a thing, sorry. Been meaning to call you about that, but I got busy on a double murder.”
“Thanks for checking,” I said. “If you get a chance, could you check the name Hank Calvin? I have a witness who claims she saw the man I’m looking for, back in nineteen seventy-nine. He was working as a bit player on a television show using that name. I’m looking at the Internet Movie Database and I see credits under that name from nineteen forty-six through nineteen eighty-one. When I ran a background check on Henry Calhoun, I found information back to the early eighties, but no further.”
“Hank Calvin,” Liam repeated. “Sure, I’ll take a look. Might take me a few days to get to it.”
“Thanks, I appreciate it.”
After ending the call, I rinsed cold coffee from my mug and left my office. I walked to the Alameda County Courthouse and waited outside the Twelfth Street entrance, where the security checkpoint was located. A moment later, my client, a defense attorney, came out. We walked up Oak Street toward Lake Merritt, the large lake in the middle of downtown Oakland. A nearby gaggle of Canada geese waddled across the grass, honking and eating. A mother with a toddler in tow held onto her little girl, who seemed determined to chase the geese. Workers from the county offices and nearby businesses sat on the grass eating their lunches, or joined the crowds of people who walked or ran around the lake’s three-mile perimeter. When we were finished conferring about the case, the attorney went back to the courthouse and I walked in the direction of my Franklin Street office, stopping at a deli to buy lunch, turkey and provolone on an onion roll, instead of my usual pastrami on rye.
My cell phone rang as I left the deli. I answered, straining to hear the caller over the noise of traffic and people on Twelfth Street. “This is Joel Corwin,” a man’s voice said. “I’m returning your call from yesterday. I must say, you’ve got me intrigued. Why is a private investigator looking for information about my Uncle Harold?”
“Your uncle being reported missing may have something to do with a case I’m working on. Or it may just be a coincidence. At this point I’m not sure. I can’t discuss details due to client confidentiality.” I rounded the corner onto Franklin Street and headed for my office building in the middle of the block. “What can you tell me about Harold?”
“Not much,” Corwin said. “My father, Stan, never talked about him. Dad was a Marine. He fought in the Pacific and got wounded at Okinawa. He had all sorts of medals. And Gramps was in the Army in France during World War One. So Uncle Harry being a deserter was a sore subject for both of them. They were ashamed of him. To tell you the truth, I never heard the deserter story until I was in college. I knew Dad had a younger brother but my impression was that Uncle Harry had died when he was a kid. Come to think of it, he was a kid, just eighteen when he left home.”
So many of them were so young, I thought, fighting and dying in Europe and the Pacific, like my own grandfather, and Stanley Corwin and Pearl’s first husband. “What about the rest of the family? Your grandmother and your aunts? Any theories as to why Harold would go missing?”
“The women in the family always said the Army must have made a mistake,” Corwin said. “They were sure Harold died in that fire and the other guy went AWOL. Granny said if Harold had left Camp Roberts alive, he would have come home to Oakland. Now that you bring it up, I wonder if there’s a way to find out if it really was Harold that died. Exhume the body, you know. These days you hear about DNA testing and all that.”
“Probably there is. I’m not sure where the soldier who died was buried. The testing is expensive.”
“And it happened so long ago. Gramps and Dad are gone. So are Granny and Aunt Donna. But my Aunt Thelma is still alive and kicking. She’ll probably outlive us all.”
“Then I want to talk with her. Where can I find her?”
“I’ll give he
r your phone number,” he said. “She’ll find you.”
“Thanks. I’ll look forward to hearing from her.” I hung up the phone and entered my building, taking the stairs up to my third-floor office. I ate my lunch at my desk, then I switched on the computer to work on a report for a client. I’d just sent the document to the printer when the phone rang.
The woman on the other end of the line had a brisk, no-nonsense voice. “This is Thelma Darwell. My nephew Joel tells me you’re asking questions about my brother Harry.”
“I am. Do you have some time now?”
“I’m on my way out the door,” she said. “But if you get yourself over here to Alameda, I’ll be happy to talk with you in about an hour, at the tennis courts at Lower Washington Park.”
“I’ll meet you there,” I said.
Chapter 30
We should all age as well as Thelma Darwell, I thought from the bench where I sat, watching the woman hustle around the tennis court. She was short, about five feet two inches, and she wore a brace on her left knee, visible below the hem of her blue shorts. She must have been past eighty. She and her doubles partner, a trim man with silver hair and glasses, trounced their opponents in straight sets. After the match ended and the four players shook hands over the net, she walked toward me. I stood and noticed the logo on her T-shirt, from the National Senior Games.
“How did you do at the Games?” I gestured at the shirt.
“Two gold medals, one in mixed doubles and one in women’s doubles. I’ll keep playing as long as I’m able. My daughter says, in the end they’ll carry me off the tennis court.” She removed her sun visor, revealing short, tousled white hair above a tanned, wrinkled face and a pair of friendly blue eyes. “You must be Jeri Howard.”
“I am.” We shook hands and I gave her my business card. “Thanks for agreeing to talk with me, Mrs. Darwell.”
“Call me Thelma,” she said. “Well, I had to, when Joel told me it was about Harry. Why are you asking questions about him?”
“It relates to a case I’m working on,” I said. “But I can’t discuss the details.”
“I suppose not.” She zipped her tennis racquet into a red nylon bag and took a sip from a water bottle. “I’ll tell you straight out, my brother never deserted. Harry was proud to be in the Army. He was wild to go, especially since our older brother, Stan, had already joined the Marines, right after Pearl Harbor. That’s all Harry talked about the whole first year of the war, trying to convince my folks to let him join up. But my parents said no, he had to wait until he was eighteen. He enlisted that very day, his eighteenth birthday, the sixth of January, 1943. Does that sound like someone who would desert?”
“No, it doesn’t.” But he could have, said the devil’s advocate in my mind. What if Harold had arrived at Camp Roberts and found out the Army wasn’t his cup of tea?
“The Army got it wrong,” Thelma said, shaking her head as though reading my thoughts. “I wish there was a way to prove it. That whole business just broke my mother’s heart. And it drove a wedge between her and Papa. Mama never believed Harry had deserted. She insisted till the day she died that if he went AWOL, he’d have come home and at least explained. Papa said that if Harry was a deserter, he would have been afraid to come home because he knew Papa would turn him in, or make him go back, face up to it somehow. But Harry never came home. Mama figured he died in that fire and someone else took his identity. That’s what I thought when I saw that newspaper article a few years back, about all those wallets at Camp Roberts, the ones that had been stolen and thrown into the heating ducts.”
“I read the article, too.” And it had me thinking the same thing. “When was the last time you saw your brother?”
“I was twelve when Harry left home,” Thelma said. “A month or so later, we drove down to Camp Roberts to visit him one weekend, Mama, Papa, me and my big sister, Donna. Stan was already in the Marines by then. We visited missions along the way and stayed in an auto court in San Miguel. Harry was glad to see us, and he seemed to be happy. He said he liked the training and he’d made some new friends. We went to church that Sunday, then a dinner at the USO. That was the last time I saw him.” She sighed. “I still have the letters Harry wrote to Mama from the camp.”
“Do you? May I read them? To see if he mentions any of his Army buddies.”
“You mean that guy who died in the fire? Yes, he does.” She shouldered her tennis bag. “Come home with me. I’ll let you read the letters.”
Thelma and I walked out to the parking lot next to the tennis courts. She stowed her tennis bag in the trunk of a blue Volvo. I followed her to a well-kept Victorian house on San Antonio Avenue. She had a pitcher of iced tea in the refrigerator and poured glasses for both of us. She directed me out to the deck at the back of the house, warmed by the late afternoon sun, and went into one of the bedrooms. She returned with a fabric-covered box containing her brother’s letters.
Harold Corwin, age eighteen and newly enlisted in the Army, went to Camp Roberts in January 1943. He had vanished the night of the fire, March 20, 1943. The packet of letters he’d written to his mother during those two months was pitifully thin and lovingly preserved, tied with a blue ribbon. I counted ten envelopes and two postcards. I wiped my hands on a napkin, wanting to make sure I didn’t damage the paper, and opened the first envelope. I was guessing Harold’s accounts of Army life had been edited for his family’s consumption, but the impression I had as I read this letter was of a fresh-faced, naïve young man, away from home for the first time in his life, and nervous about the prospect of going out to the Pacific to fight the Japanese. It was really different to sleep in bunks surrounded by all those other guys. The fellow in the next bunk snored like a buzz saw, he wrote. It was hard to get any sleep those first few nights, and the company got up so early. The chow was all right, and there was plenty of it, but of course it didn’t hold a candle to Mama’s home cooking.
In his second letter from camp, Harold talked about day-to-day life in Company A of the 78th Infantry Training Battalion. Then he mentioned that there was another guy there from the old neighborhood—Salvatore Bianchi—in the same company. “You remember Sal,” Harold wrote. “He was on the basketball team. His father works at the same cannery as Pop.”
I looked up from the letter “Did you know Salvatore Bianchi?” I asked Thelma.
“Sal? Oh, yes. He was Harry’s age, and his younger sister Adelina was one of my classmates. We were friends later, in high school. I still see her from time to time.”
“Is Sal still alive? Your brother says he was at Camp Roberts at the same time, and I’d like to talk with him.”
She set down her glass. “You know, I’d forgotten Sal was there for training. He was wounded in the war, got a Purple Heart. He stayed in the Army, made a career of it, then retired after thirty years and came back to Oakland. But yes, he’s still alive. At least he was the last time I talked with Adelina. She said his wife died. He sold his house and moved into a retirement home. Let me see if I can find out where.”
She went inside the house. A moment later I heard her talking on the phone. I glanced at a postcard showing a scene of the Camp Roberts Soldier Bowl, with a note saying that there was talk that Bing Crosby was going to perform there. I opened the third letter. Harold wrote about the training he was going through there at the camp, learning how to use a rifle and throw a hand grenade, how to crawl under wire and read maps. He added that he saw Sal from time to time, at chow or in one of the camp’s recreation halls. In the fourth letter, toward the end, he mentioned meeting a guy from Colorado, Will Kravin. The two had met while playing Ping-Pong at the San Miguel USO. There was going to be a rodeo there at Camp Roberts, and Will, who’d grown up on a ranch in southwestern Colorado, could ride steers. The fifth letter contained more information about the training Harold was going through, and also said he’d been playing cards at the recreation hall with Will Kravin and another guy from Colorado, whose name was Vidal. I wasn’t sure if
this was a first or a last name.
Harold wrote the sixth letter in the stack after his family visited him at the camp, in mid-February 1943. Following that was a second postcard, showing a Paso Robles street scene. Then, in the seventh letter, came the name I was looking for. Harold, writing to his family in the last week of February, roughly a month before the fire, said he’d become friends with another guy in his company, Byron Jasper, who used to be an actor in the movies before he’d been drafted. There was a hint between the lines that he didn’t quite know what to make of this exotic fellow from Los Angeles. From the next two letters, the eighth and the ninth, I gathered that Harold, Will, Vidal and Byron became pals, playing cards on the weekends in the recreation halls on the base, or Ping-Pong at the San Miguel USO, which had everything from a soda counter to a library.
Thelma returned to the deck and handed me a piece of paper. “Sal’s still living in Oakland, that big retirement home just off Piedmont Avenue.”
I looked at the address. “I know the place.”
Now I reached the tenth, and last, letter in Harold Corwin’s meager correspondence. The envelope was postmarked March 18, 1943, two days before the fire, and it felt thicker. I opened the envelope and pulled out the letter. Tucked inside the sheets of paper I found a small black-and-white snapshot showing four young men in civilian clothes, looking as though they were ready to go into town on a Saturday night. I flipped over the photo. On the back, in fading pencil, was the legend L-R, Harry, Will, Vidal, Byron, 13 March 42.
I had been eager to find a photo of Byron Jasper from the 1940s. Now here it was, in my hands. I held it closer, examining every detail of the young man on the far right side of the picture. Binky was partly hidden by the bulkier form of the man next to him, and something in his manner suggested that he’d shrunk back from the camera, not wanting have his picture taken. But I could see his face and his left side. He was wearing the loose-fitting pants of the era, a long-sleeved shirt and a tie.