by Jack Lynch
A silence fell over the room. Peterson’s gaze went from me to the mirror outside and back to me again. The sleeping Mitchell Tuck made a snort in the chair in the corner, then resumed his slumber. I took out a pad and made a couple of notes. I didn’t like the situation. Not a bit. I looked up at Bancetti.
“And you’d want somebody like me to go in your place up to Claireborn and try to get Buddy off the hook.”
“That’s right. You do that and I release the prisoners, we turn ourselves back over to the system and serve whatever additional time they hand down for trying to take a walk. Maybe even someday you’d get a nice fee for what you did. I couldn’t hack that myself, right now. I couldn’t even afford a lawyer for Buddy.” He glanced across the room. “Mitchell took care of that, not that it’s done Buddy all that much good.”
The sound of his name seemed to waken the sleeping Cherub, Mitchell Tuck. He sat up and shook his head briefly. He gently massaged his arm near where it was bandaged. It didn’t seem to be hurting him much.
“This is Peter Bragg, the man the newspaper guy sent for,” Bancetti told him.
Tuck didn’t even look at me. He just grunted and continued to massage his arm.
I got up and stretched. Peterson picked up the gun.
“I want to see the prisoners,” I told Bancetti.
“What?”
“Before I say yes or no to going up to Claireborn and trying to save your brother’s ass, I want to see the prisoners.”
“Nobody said anything about any conditions on this thing.”
“I just did. And there are apt to be others. We just might be able to work ourselves out an arrangement. The way we start to do that is with you letting me see the prisoners.”
The long hours since the breakout attempt had taken their toll. That’s what negotiators in a hostage situation always count on. It was pretty elemental, but it worked. Bancetti got up and crossed to the door, and gave a brief rap, then opened it. He looked inside and muttered a curse.
“For Christ’s sake, wake up, Augie. What kind of a guard are you?”
“I was just resting my eyes,” complained a mild voice in the next room. “Everyone else was sleeping.”
“Come on out.”
The sweet-faced killer came out of the room rubbing his eyes. He glanced once at me then went over behind the table to sit down next to Pork Peterson. Mitchell Tuck was sitting up alertly now. Bancetti motioned me to the doorway. A little smile crossed Peterson’s face. He got up from the table and started to follow me.
“Sit down, Pork,” Mitchell Tuck told him sharply. The wounded man might have been giving voice commands to a dog. He was leaning forward in his chair, staring grimly at the big man.
“I wanna look too,” rumbled Peterson.
“Give Beau the gun, then sit back down,” Tuck told him, quietly this time.
Peterson’s face showed disappointment, but he handed the 9mm to Bancetti and sat back down beside Augie Finseth. Bancetti stood back from the doorway, carrying the gun waist-high. I stepped around him.
The people inside were just waking up also, at least the uninjured guard and the two women were. The other guard was unconscious, curled up on the room’s one couch. He appeared a little shriveled. And cold. They must have taken the blankets from the couch to put over the windows in the next room. The other guard was on the floor nearby, stretching.
The older of the two women rose to her feet, blinking rapidly, her face turning angry as she remembered where she was. The girl sitting next to her studied me gravely. The huddled man on the couch stirred briefly and groaned. Bancetti crossed to the couch and stared at him.
While the ringleader’s attention was diverted by the injured man, the girl on the floor, still staring at me, raised one finger to her lips and winked at me. And then I recognized her and knew why the people in the state capitol in Sacramento were applying the heat to Warden Thompson. Despite the rumpled, baggy pants and gray jogging jacket she wore, with her hair piled in a loose bun atop her head, I knew her to be one of the sexier starlets to light up the Hollywood skies in recent years. She went by the name Louise Dancine, and her most recent film had a lot of scenes shot near the water, with this young girl wearing a wet T-shirt at times, and once or twice, not even the T-shirt. It was obvious that her captors didn’t know her real identity. No wonder Sacramento wanted the women out.
I crossed to the wakened guard and nodded toward his unconscious partner. “How is he?”
The lanky guard studied his hands and shrugged. “I worry about him. He hasn’t come to since he was worked over. Once during the night—I thought he’d died.”
I looked over at Bancetti. The stocky inmate returned my gaze calmly. “He and Jones there tried to be heroes. They shouldn’t have.”
The older woman stuck out her hand in no-nonsense fashion. “Hi. I’m Margot Smith. Who are you?”
I introduced myself. “The chief honcho here says he and his men will surrender if I help his younger brother out of a jam.”
“Do you think you can?”
“Maybe. It’s the sort of work I’ve done before.”
“You a cop?”
“A private one.”
She grunted, as if it didn’t exactly bowl her over. Margot Smith struck me as having a lot of sense. She was a husky woman with gray hair cut in bangs over her forehead. She had a square, forthright face and a strong grip when she shook hands.
“What were you two doing in here?”
“I give a writing class here a couple of times a week. Nicki Rogers,” she said, glancing at the girl, “is a friend who joins me once in a while to help out.”
The girl was still huddled against the wall, trying to keep warm. She gave me a little smile and wiggled the fingers of one hand in greeting.
“Nicki a writer too?”
“She’s been published,” Margot Smith told me.
“Have you been treated okay since this started?” I asked her.
“They were a little rough shoving us back here right after the shooting in front. And when they herded us in here, the big one in the other room half tore Nicki’s blouse off.”
I glanced down at the girl called Nicki Rogers who performed under the name Louise Dancine. She raised one shoulder and let it drop. “I’m okay,” she said. “Margot came on like the U.S. of A. Seventh Cavalry, until he hit her once. The others have kept him away from me ever since.”
I looked back at the older woman and now saw the dark bruise alongside one cheekbone. I turned to Bancetti.
“All right, I’ll go see what I can do for Buddy.”
Some of the tension seemed to go out of him. He apparently had more confidence in me than Margot Smith did.
“But there’s one more condition before I do,” I added.
Bancetti’s face tightened. “What is it?”
“The two women go out with me now. You keep the guards.”
“No way.”
“Peterson attacked the girl already. The warden told me about his record.”
Bancetti and I had a little staring contest.
“I’ll let the one go, the older one, to show our good faith.”
“She isn’t the one who was attacked. I want them both.”
“No. Just the older one. We keep the pretty one. It might keep the people outside from trying anything foolhardy, if they know the pretty one’s in here with Peterson, with his record and all.” He gave me a little smile. “You can even tell them that.”
It wasn’t going to do any good to argue about it. He was making the right decision, of course. It’s the way I’d have done it if I were him. I turned back to Margot Smith.
“Okay, let’s go.”
Margot glanced once at the girl. Nicki was staring at the floor in front of her. Then the older woman turned to stare down at the injured guard. “No,” she said. “Take this man instead.” She raised her eyes to mine. “I’ve done a little nursing in my time. He’s badly hurt. It might already be too late. He’s the one who
should get the chance.”
“You’re absolutely sure?”
She nodded. “We’ll be all right. We look out for each other.”
I looked at Bancetti. He nodded.
“Okay.”
And that’s how I walked back out of the small rooms under siege in the activities building of San Quentin prison, with an injured, maybe dying, guard over one shoulder.
THREE
The morning drive up to Claireborn felt like a new chance on life. The air was crisp, the sun was pure and the California poppies gloried in the morning dew. And despite the occasional traffic along the freeway to Sacramento and the mountains beyond, it seemed so quiet, and the heavy old Cadillac sedan my friend had left in my care didn’t have all that much to do with it. Going inside the walls of San Quentin had shaken me, I had to admit it. I’d been in there before, when I was a reporter for The Chronicle, but that had been nothing compared with the charged, choked-up tension created by the desperate men holding the hostages at one end of the activities building, and the desperate men huddled behind the hallway barrier a few yards away. And to appear rational, on either side, you had to be nuts.
They had taken the unconscious guard to the prison hospital, but his injuries were more than the prison unit could cope with. Soon after, he’d been taken by ambulance to Marin General.
I’d spent another twenty minutes with Warden Thompson, telling him about the deal I’d made with Beau Bancetti, and assuring him that the hostages seemed well enough for the moment. I asked for any other information Beau’s prison records might have about his family. There wasn’t much. His brother wasn’t even mentioned. He had a wife living in the East Bay. She’d been to the warden’s office the night before, trying by phone to urge Beau to give himself up. I had jotted down her address and phone number as I left, brushing off reporter’s queries on my way out, and started driving toward the mountains.
Claireborn is enough miles into the Sierra foothills northeast of Sacramento to escape the worst of the valley heat in summer, but still low enough and far enough from the summit near Norden to keep from being buried under by snow in the winter. It was a nice little place to live, if you liked small town, rural life, and the seasonal residents on nearby Lake Appleton created just enough pizzazz and tourist business to stir its bones in summer. A small plywood-products plant a couple of miles out of town provided a number of jobs for the community, and there were dairy farms and horse and sheep ranches scattered around in the surrounding hills.
The town was nearly a mile from the freeway. A paved, two-lane highway in good repair ran like an arrow from the freeway to the town, past ranches and farms and wooded stretches of tall, gently stirring pine trees and quivering poplars. The area had a likable feel to it, and on the outskirts of the town itself I had a surprising experience. A group of three or four boys and girls lounging on the steps of a big, old-fashioned house set just back from the road waved to me as I drove past. I was so startled I almost didn’t wave back. I had been living around San Francisco long enough now to have forgotten there were kids in towns where that sort of greeting to a stranger was commonplace. I’d once been told by an old Chronicle photographer that San Francisco itself used to be a little bit that way. People would smile and greet each other on the street, and politely give way to one another at intersections. It had a really small town feel to it, the photographer had told me. But that had been many years ago, on the other side of World War II.
Claireborn itself, although the county seat, was a really small town. As near as I could tell, it must have had three or four streets running parallel to the main drag I was on, and maybe a dozen cross streets intersecting. The main business section, or downtown, took up about three blocks of Central Street and a portion of the next street over. The buildings were low and old, three stories at most, many of them made of brick, a lot of them wooden. But people kept things up. While the structures themselves were old, there was a lot of new paint in evidence, and the walks were swept clean. People seemed proud to live in the town of Claireborn.
I parked alongside a cafe that seemed to be doing good business and went in for some breakfast and to listen to the locals. They seemed a cheerful lot. The waitress had a horsy face but a warm smile and she paid attention, had good moves. When she brought my fried eggs and sausage patty, they were hot. The sweat of San Quentin had long dried on my back, and I felt almost human again. Then I did the one other thing I had to do before I went to work. I found a phone booth in the morning stillness outside to phone Allison France, in Barracks Cove, over on the coast. I told her about the morning I’d spent at San Quentin and the deal I’d made with Beau Bancetti. I told her it looked as if the weekend we’d planned would have to be postponed.
She’s heard about the trouble at the prison on the radio, and she took the canceled weekend as well as I could have hoped, but I wondered how many of these disappointments I’d be able to lay at her feet before she told me to go choke. She was my dream lady, when I thought about such things, a big, honey-blonde girl who did freelance art work for a living and oil painting for her soul. I’d met her in the course of a job and we’d gone a little gaga over each other. Then I’d had to rough up a neurotic man she’d known and liked for a number of years. It wasn’t your normally romantic beginning to a relationship and we’d had our ups and downs since. We still were strongly attracted to each other when we could get together. But my work had forced me to disappoint her many times. This was the latest. And as she pointed out, this wasn’t even my work, if I wasn’t getting paid for it. I seemed to be doing somebody a favor, Casey Martin, the state Department of Corrections or a felon in San Quentin. She couldn’t figure out which and neither could I. I told her I’d make it up to her by taking her down to the jazz festival in Monterey come September. She observed that September still was many months to come. I agreed, and told her I’d try to get up to Barracks Cove the following weekend. She said she had other plans for the following weekend. I said maybe the weekend after. She said maybe. And that’s how I had to leave it before setting out to learn who, or even if, somebody had killed a man and tried to hang a frame on Beau Bancetti’s neurotic brother.
I found the courthouse easily enough on Central. It was a two-story, red brick building that had been built in the 1920s. The sheriff’s quarters were in the basement. They told me the man I wanted to talk to was a detective sergeant named Bart Findley, and they gave me directions to his office in the rear. The front reception area was newly painted in an off-white shade and brightly lighted with overhead fluorescent tubes. That’s where most business with the general public was conducted. The bowels of the place, and it was a building that ran deeply in from the street, were another matter. Offices, supply areas, records room, armory, squad room, property room and locker rooms were poorly lit, musty and generally appeared as if the walls still treasured the first coat of paint applied back in the 1920s. A few years earlier the California voters had staged a tax revolt of sorts, putting a brake on property taxes. They had been going up at a stiff rate, and they financed most functions of local government. What the voters wanted was to put an end to proliferating programs of questionable benefit and to cut some of the fat out of the bureaucracy. What they got was curtailed money for law enforcement and cutbacks in libraries. The system looked out for its own.
Sergeant Bart Findley had a cramped office to himself in the deepest part of the building. It was as poorly lit and musty as the other areas I’d seen. A couple of travel posters added a touch of color to the otherwise drab walls. Most of the room was taken up by file cabinets and his desk, a cold gray metal thing that looked as if it had come from the Army/Navy store. The desk had a phone, some family pictures and a green cardboard desk mat with a lot of paperwork spread across it. As I entered, the sergeant looked up with raised eyebrows. He was a lean man in his middle forties, with dark features and lank black hair that fell to the collar of his khaki, short-sleeved shirt. He had a smooth, angular face with high cheekbone
s and dark, flinty eyes. He wasn’t as tall as I was, but I would never make the mistake of trying to resist arrest by this man.
I introduced myself and showed him the photostat of my license. “I’ve been asked to look into the homicide Buddy Bancetti is being held for,” I told him. “But rather than tell you a long story you’d only want to confirm anyway, why don’t you put in a call to Warden Barry Thompson at San Quentin, tell him I’m here and let him tell you why I’m here.”
“Does this have anything to do with the escape attempt I heard about?”
“You put things together in a hurry. Yes it does. Leader of the attempt is Bancetti’s older brother. He was planning to come up here and knock heads until he found the murderer. He said Buddy couldn’t have done anything like that. I agreed to come and look around in his place. I’ve never been a professional homicide investigator. I don’t expect to learn anything you haven’t. I’m really more or less a stalling device for the prison. But I told Bancetti I’d make a good-faith effort on his behalf. They have hostages.”
He didn’t say another word until he put through the call to San Quentin and listened quietly. After a few moments he thanked the warden and hung up with a grunt.
“Jesus Christ, Louise Dancine?” the sergeant asked, looking up at me with an exaggerated gape. “That poor, fucking warden.” He pulled out a chair that was jammed in between a file cabinet and the back wall and handed it across the desk to me.
The chair’s rear legs stuck almost out into the hallway, but I sat. “That’s right, I recognized her. She and another woman hostage seemed to be holding up well. Four hours ago, that was. The inmates don’t know what sort of prize package they have their hands on. Sacramento does. The warden’s got a blowtorch on him.”
Findley had been tapping a pencil on the desk top. Now he held it in midair. “The warden didn’t tell me you’d been in there and seen the hostages. Tell me about that.”
I told him. And when I was through he got out of his chair and shook his head. He opened a file drawer and took out a folder. From that he removed the original report made out by the sheriff’s deputy who’d been first on the homicide scene. It was a single sheet covered front and back with small, block printing by a Deputy Wayne Dorenbusch. It wasn’t a long report, since the job of the first officer on the scene of a homicide is to confirm the death, secure the area and send for the people who would conduct the actual investigation. The reports of those men, in turn, would be longer. Much longer. There is an onerous amount of paperwork connected with law enforcement these days, and Sergeant Findley went back to some of his while I read what Deputy Dorenbusch had to say. He’d responded to an anonymous telephone call the department received reporting trouble at the lakeside home of one John Donald (J. D.) Cornell. The deputy had no response when he knocked at the door. He conducted a perimeter search of the one-story dwelling and found a sliding glass door slightly open on a deck built off one side of the home. He called out but received no response. He observed from the doorway a broken table lamp on the floor and other indications that some form of struggle had taken place. He entered the house, conducted a quick search and discovered the body of the decedent, J. D. Cornell, partially disrobed, atop a bed in the bedroom, apparently the victim of multiple blows to the skull. Deputy Dorenbusch returned to his patrol wagon and made a radio report to the dispatcher, then made a quick search of the outer grounds and boathouse and dock area behind the house to determine that nobody else was present. He then stationed himself so as to observe both the front of the property and the rear to prevent entry by others until investigators arrived on the scene. The report was dated a day shy of three weeks earlier, which meant the killing had happened on a Sunday. I glanced back through the report.