Till The Old Men Die (The Jeri Howard Mystery Series Book 2)

by Janet Dawson

  I nodded. The ugly incident had been a media circus. The International Hotel once stood near San Francisco’s Chinatown, full of elderly Asian men like those Alex described, alone, with no families, spending the sum of their remaining days in its inexpensive rooms. In the late seventies some corporation wanted to tear down the International and build something else, so the old men had been messily and painfully evicted, dispersed to other cheap hotels in other marginal neighborhoods. The International Hotel was bulldozed into oblivion. The irony was that nothing had been built in its place. Instead of homes, however meager, there was now a large gravel-filled hole.

  “He came to this fiesta last year,” Alex was saying, “with a tape recorder, interviewing the old men. Maybe you’ll find his notes and transcripts when you go through those boxes. Lito was interested in all kinds of history. That’s important, for people like us, for someone to tell our story.” His wave encompassed the old men as well as a group of children playing on the lawn.

  “We helped build America, too, but you wouldn’t know it to look in most history books. You’re white, Jeri. You don’t know what it’s like. All the time I went to school I never saw a picture in those books that looked like me. And I never read a word about Filipinos, unless the book was talking about World War Two.”

  “Maybe I do understand,” I said, thinking about all the history books that didn’t say much about women. “I hope things are changing. Was your uncle also interested in family history?”

  Alex looked at me and shrugged. “I told you I don’t know about the Manibusans, not much more than I told you the other night.”

  “You didn’t tell me anything the other night, except that the Manibusans came from San Ygnacio and that they left after World War Two. I learned more from Pete Pascal. Tell me about your uncle Javier.”

  Alex’s face tightened and his eyes became opaque. He didn’t like talking about this other Manibusan uncle. Yesterday Pascal had mentioned that Javier was organizing sugar workers. Did his politics make this mysterious uncle the black sheep of the Manibusan clan? “He’s a couple of years older than Lito.” Alex’s words came slowly, reluctantly. “He was going to be a priest, but he got into radical politics instead.”

  “How radical?” I asked. “Are we talking about nonviolent demonstrations? Or is he toting a gun somewhere in the mountains?”

  Alex didn’t answer right away, and when he did, his voice was flat and cold. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised.” He crumpled a napkin, tossed it onto his empty plate, and stood up. “Let’s get out of here.”

  We went back inside the hall to say good-bye to Aunt Josefa and Aunt Medy. As we approached the two old ladies, I saw Felice Navarro’s purple jump suit, her face hidden by her camera. She seemed to be watching us through her lens. Then she moved the camera away from her face and stared past me at Alex with a frown that raised my curiosity level. Alex looked up and saw Felice, then quickly glanced away as his aunts enveloped him in hugs and admonitions, as though they wouldn’t see him again for years. Felice hid her face behind the camera again.

  When we finally left the hall, Alex’s mood had darkened. On the drive back to Oakland he popped a tape into the cassette player, turning the volume just high enough to make conversation difficult. By the time we reached my apartment, his former good humor had returned. He walked me to my door, then put both hands at my waist and drew me close.

  “Going to invite me in?”

  “No. I have things to do. Like laundry and housework.”

  He smiled and kissed me, at first gently, then with more urgency. “I can think of better ways to pass the time.”

  His mouth was creating all sorts of pleasurable sensations, but I placed my hands on his chest and pushed him away. “I had a great time at the fiesta, Alex. But let’s keep it on a friendly level, shall we?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, all innocence.

  “Ever since we met you’ve been trying to get me into bed.”

  He acknowledged my words with a wicked grin. “Am I getting any closer to success?”

  “You expect me to answer that?”

  Alex shook his head. “No. Let’s keep a little mystery in the equation. It’s more fun that way.”

  Eleven

  SUNDAY WAS DAD’S BIRTHDAY. THE DEATH OF LITO Manibusan and its repercussions were forgotten in the pleasure of a family get-together. Dad picked me up that morning and we drove to Sonoma to spend the day with my brother Brian and his family. Brian had marinated chicken overnight in his special barbecue sauce and fired up the backyard grill. He put the chicken on to cook shortly after Dad and I arrived. Soon the aroma wafted, onto the patio and set my gastric juices roiling. The kids — five-year-old Todd and three-year-old Amy — claimed Grandpa and dragged him off to show him various treasures. I poured myself a glass of wine and went to the kitchen, where my sister-in-law, Sheila, was chopping vegetables for a salad. She assigned me the task of making garlic bread, and I set to work at one end of the counter.

  Dad and Brian are both teachers, so over dinner they dissected the state of education in California while I talked about small businesses with Sheila. She’s a weaver who works at home, selling her products in shops in Sonoma and Glen Ellen. Today she was excited about a deal she had closed the day before, placing some of her textiles in a gallery in Santa Rosa. After a while we cleared the dishes off the picnic table and Sheila brought out Dad’s birthday cake, a tall chocolate concoction that looked as though it had a million calories and tasted so good, every one of them was worth it.

  While we lingered over cake and coffee, my mother called from Monterey to wish Dad a happy birthday. Despite my parents’ divorce several years ago, a shock to my brother and me, Tim and Marie Howard remained friends. After all, they had thirty years and two children to tie them together. Dad passed the cordless phone to the two grandkids, then it went from hand to hand.

  When my turn came, Mother asked when I was coming to Monterey to see her and the extensive network of Doyle and Ravella relatives who proliferate on the central coast. I put her off with vague promises and phrases about a busy schedule. Dad occasionally went down to Monterey to see Mother, who was so occupied running her restaurant that she didn’t come to the Bay Area often. Brian and his family visited her more frequently, but he and Mother meshed well, while I was closer to Dad. She and I hadn’t really gotten along since I hit puberty and I resented her walking out on Dad. That’s why my visits to Monterey are infrequent and short.

  It was early evening when Dad and I drove back to Oakland, fighting the end-of-the-weekend traffic on Interstate 80. I felt sleepy with too much food and not enough exercise. After Dad left my apartment I took a brisk walk around Lake Merritt, which gave me my second wind and the desire to spend some uninterrupted time at my office, resuming my search through the professor’s papers. I had managed to look through two cartons on Friday. Now I lifted another from the stack and removed the lid.

  Yesterday’s conversation with Alex was fresh in my mind, so the first folder that caught my eye was the one labeled MANONGS. I pulled it from the box and examined its contents, finding the transcripts of the interviews the professor had conducted at last year’s fiesta. I read through them, discovering what it was like to toil in the fields of the Salinas or San Joaquin valleys, harvesting lettuce, cauliflower, or winter peas.

  I pulled out one folder labeled FILIPINO/U.S. MILITARY and read about the long history of Filipinos joining American military services. Like blacks and Latinos, they had been shunted into steward ratings, finally being allowed to move into other job specialities. Reading it, I understood what it meant to Alex to have the gold oak leaves of a lieutenant commander on his collar.

  In the next carton I found a large accordion file stuffed with information about Maximiliano Navarro and his family. I pulled out papers and clippings and began to read. The businessman was older than the professor, but they were from the same province, Pampanga, where the Navarro family owned a sugar plant
ation near San Fernando, the provincial capital. Navarro’s father, Rufino, had been accused of collaborating with the Japanese during the occupation, but evidently these charges had not been proven, for I saw nothing else in the file that indicated the elder Navarro was ever prosecuted. His son Maximiliano, on the other hand, had fought the invaders as a partisan and been hailed as a war hero. In the postwar years, as a young, brash entrepreneur, Maximiliano Navarro rapidly expanded the family’s sugar plantation and built a business empire that included rice and copra production as well as sugar, mining interests in the mountainous north, and the businesses Alex had mentioned during yesterday’s conversation.

  As I read through the collection of newspaper clippings and magazine articles, I came upon a photo of Maximiliano Navarro with both his sons, Rick and Jun, noting the strong resemblance between Rick and his father. From what Felice had said the other day about her brother Rick and the success of his import business, I suspected that there was more than a physical resemblance between the two men.

  I didn’t see any such physical echo in Felice. Perhaps she looked like her mother, who, according to one magazine piece about Navarro, had committed suicide a few years ago after a long and debilitating illness. None of the articles mentioned Felice, as though the daughter didn’t count. There was a magazine profile of Jun, who looked sleepy-eyed and prosperous, with photos taken at the living quarters on the sugar plantation near San Fernando. Rick had a more lean and hungry look in the photos that accompanied an article from a California business magazine. The feature talked about Rick’s management of Pacific Rim Imports, and described him as a worthy successor to his father’s business empire.

  Curious, I thought, that Dr. Manibusan would keep such an extensive file on the Navarros. Did he have a personal interest? Perhaps not. In the next carton I opened, I found even larger files on several other Filipino families, more powerful and certainly more well known, like the Aquinos, the Cojuancos, the Laurels, and, of course, the Marcoses.

  My office window had darkened from blue sky to black night and my legs had stiffened in their cross-legged position. I stretched them out in front of me, massaging calves and thighs, and looked up, surprised to see that it was well past nine o’clock. I stood up, yawned, and stretched, then began straightening the mess I had made, preparing to go home. As I picked up one folder, something fell out, an old composition notebook with a faded black cover. It was an odd size, about six by eight inches, bound at one side, and it was sealed in a plastic freezer bag. It must have been quite old, for the edges of the pages were yellowed. Inside the front cover I saw “Carlos Teodoro Manibusan” printed in block letters, and the date January 1, 1919.

  I leafed through the first few pages. The writing was in blue ink, grown faint with age, and the words mostly Tagalog, though here and there I saw English phrases, mathematical exercises, and that old standby, a diagramed sentence. A school notebook belonging to the professor’s father, I guessed, a historical curiosity as well as a link to the past, lovingly preserved. I slipped it back into its protective bag and sealed it.

  As I stacked files back into boxes, another file caught my eye, labeled simply CORRESPONDENCE. Cradling it in one arm, I opened it and riffled through the sheets of paper. No envelope here, just letters from fellow historians and universities about seminars and articles. I saw several sheets clipped together, the top with the letterhead of the United States Army. It was a letter to Dr. Manibusan, responding to his inquiry about a Lieutenant O. M. Cardiff. Cardiff left active service in November 1945. The most recent address available for Cardiff was on California Street, in San Francisco’s Richmond district.

  A yellow Post-it note was stuck to the side of the letter, covered with the black scrawls I now recognized as Dr. Manibusan’s handwriting. It read “M. Harold Beddoes, SF, June 1946. Check hospitals, assns.” My curiosity piqued, I removed the paper clip and found two letters from Dr. Manibusan to the army, requesting information on Lieutenant Cardiff, who had evidently served in the Philippines during World War II. Who was Cardiff, or, for that matter, M. Harold Beddoes? Why was the professor interested in them? Sources for one of his articles, perhaps. “Check hospitals, assns.” could mean that one or both of them was in the medical profession. I looked through the correspondence file carefully, but could find no further mention of Cardiff or Beddoes.

  On Monday I drove up to Mendocino County on another case, spending the night in Ukiah. I interviewed two witnesses in a civil lawsuit and located some documents at the courthouse, returning to Oakland late Tuesday afternoon. I wrote my report and delivered it to my client, along with photocopies of the pertinent documents. Back in my office I took the messages off my answering machine. One of them was from Inspector Cobb at SFPD. Eddie Villegas’s prints were most certainly on file, but they weren’t on the AA battery found at the scene of Dr. Manibusan’s murder. Too bad, I thought. Eddie was such a promising suspect. I wasn’t yet ready to rule him out.

  I sifted through the mail that had piled up in my absence. In that stack I found the Dun & Bradstreet report I had requested on Mabuhay Travel. I pushed the rest of the mail aside and leaned back in my chair, perusing the two-page report. The information in a D&B is provided by the company itself, so the report doesn’t as a rule include anything the company’s principals don’t want on the public record. Still, the sheets in my hand gave me some basic information on Mabuhay Travel’s finances, operations, and history, as well as some background on the Randalls.

  Mabuhay Travel had been incorporated in California seven years ago. Arthur Franklin Randall and Perlita Cruz Randall were listed as partners and they employed eight people at two locations, in Daly City and Oakland. I looked with interest at Perlita Randall’s middle name. Were she and Dolores Cruz related? Sisters, perhaps? Arthur was eighteen years older than his wife, and he’d been in the navy for thirty years. I guessed that he and Perlita had met and married while he was stationed in the Philippines, most likely at the naval base at Subic Bay.

  I went next door to see if George had returned from his weekend with nature. I found him in the same position I’d left him, fingers on keyboard and eyes on screen. “How was Yosemite?” I asked him.

  He looked up with a rapt expression in his blue eyes. “The most beautiful place on earth. I feel renewed.”

  “Good. Did you come up with anything on that information check I asked you to do?”

  “Yeah.” He swiveled away from his computer terminal and reached for a small stack of printouts in a rattan basket. “Mostly routine. I don’t know whether any of it will be helpful.”

  “Thanks. What do I owe you?”

  He waved me away. “I’ll stick a bill in your mail slot.”

  Back in my office I sifted through the reports George had gleaned from his search of computer data bases. The information on Arthur and Perlita Randall told me little more than the Dun & Bradstreet report had. The white Thunderbird Dolores Cruz was driving belonged to Charles Randall and had been purchased two years earlier with a loan from the federal credit union at Naval Air Station Alameda. That would indicate that Charles was in the navy, or a civil service employee. The name Cruz had come up several times in the computer printouts, but none of these Cruzes was Dolores. The same was true of Eduardo Villegas.

  I picked up the phone and called Alex Tongco at the air station. After assuring him I’d had a great time at the fiesta on Saturday, I got to the point. “I need a favor. Information on a guy named Charles Randall. I don’t know whether he’s military or civilian, but I think he works at Alameda.”

  “Any idea which command?” Alex asked. “There are half a dozen shore facilities here, as well as several ships.”

  “Sorry, I don’t. I’m playing a hunch. All I have to go on is a loan from the credit union on base.”

  “Does this have something to do with my uncle?”

  “I think so. Dolores Cruz is living in Randall’s condo and driving his car.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. I
know a chief over at the military personnel office.”

  I stashed the computer printouts in the Cal State file and locked it in the filing cabinet. Then I went home to my cat, who harangued me for being gone for two days, despite the fact that I’d left her plenty of food and water.

  On Wednesday morning I drove to Daly City and located Mabuhay Travel on Mission Street a few blocks off Interstate 280, next to a mom-and-pop grocery store with a steady midmorning flow of customers. A car pulled away from a space opposite the travel agency and I quickly claimed it, feeding a few coins into the meter. Then I crossed the street to the grocery store, where I bought a cup of coffee and a copy of the Philippine News.

  Newspaper under my arm, I strolled to the travel agency, where I peered in the window and pretended to be interested in its display of travel posters. Through the glass I saw a bulky gray-haired Caucasian man on the phone. At a desk next to him a diminutive Filipino woman punched a computer keyboard. She looked up and spoke to an elderly man and woman perched on chairs in front of her desk, then turned her attention back to the screen. Arthur and Perlita Randall, I decided, looking for a resemblance between Perlita and Dolores Cruz.

  I returned to my car and settled into the driver’s seat, one eye on the travel agency as I sipped the strong coffee and leafed through the newspaper. First I read a story about an immigration scam in Los Angeles, involving forged visas and a crooked employee at the U.S. Embassy in Manila, then several stories concerning the ongoing and seemingly neverending cycle of political unrest and natural disasters in the Philippines. I saw as many news items about the Philippines as there were about the Filipino community here in the United States.

  Feet in both worlds, I thought, recalling once again Pete Pascal’s words and the priest’s prayer at Saturday’s fiesta. That dichotomy was reflected here in newsprint. On the one hand, I saw concerns about immigration and assimilation, racism and defining the Filipino version of the American dream, right here in the Bay Area. On the other hand, the ghost of Ferdinand Marcos hovered over everything, like a vulture sitting on a tombstone, while Imelda fluttered handkerchiefs and eyelashes, making her incredible pronouncements as she sought to hold on to power and fortune. Power, too, was the dance in Manila, where politicians played musical candidates, jockeying for position in the contest to succeed Corazon Aquino, who had survived yet another of the many coup attempts directed at unseating her. As I read, I felt as though Manila were five miles away instead of a day’s journey by air.