Silver Shirts

by Lee Perry

  “Ohh…” Jordan murmured, finally understanding, “Okay…”

  “Normally these companies have to keep massive computing resources in reserve to deal with tasks from companies whose online activities peak at say, the end of the month… But if the infrastructure is itself dynamic, it can make their servers deal with peak usage times in a smoother, more balanced way, requiring fewer servers to sit around as backups, cutting costs as well as making the whole place operate more efficiently.”

  “Wow...” she slumped in her seat, “I think I got it… So Nancy Ward, our victim, worked for this company, Dynamic Infrastructure… She was a systems analyst manager and after she was murdered… we still don’t know where… her body was transported to a neighborhood in west Los Angeles called the Pacific Palisades…”

  “As in, Sunset Boulevard?”

  “I…” Jordan’s brow knit in a frown, “don’t know.” She stood and walked to the podium, tapping on the coordinates where the body was found. She chose a Google Earth satellite map and maximized it to fill the wide screen. Both felt slightly disoriented watching the earth rotate as the image zoomed in to an area over southern California. “Huh… so the body was found in the mountains…” She turned her head this way and that as she regarded the pinned location and Catherine left her seat to join her,

  “Sunset Boulevard is in town… Hollywood.” Stepping closer she pointed, “And this woman was found in the mountains?”

  “Evidently…” Jordan checked her watch, “I’m getting warrants for her residence and Dynamic Infrastructure so you can hack into all her computer stuff for me.”

  Catherine planted her hands on her hips, “Will do, boss…”

  She tapped all the open files shut and disconnected her tablet, “Let’s get Cam and call it a day…”

  Millburn, NJ

  He seemed to alternate between Jordan and his mother, and this night Cameron chose Jordan to join him in his nightly prayer, beckoning one parent to sit on his bed while the other watched from the doorway of his room. Tonight it was Catherine who watched from the doorway, feeling her heart fill to bursting each time as she watched Jordan and her toddler sitting on his junior bed, quietly reciting the words while their hands simultaneously formed the signs,

  “May all beings be happy, content and fulfilled. May all beings be healed and whole again. May all be protected from harm and free from fear. May there be peace in this world and throughout all possible universes.”

  Catherine grinned; she had started reciting this prayer with Cameron at night after Jordan rescued him from the Rossi compound where her ex-wife Alex had worked for the mafia crime family. Once reunited, mother and son stayed in the hospital room next to Jordan’s, and each night before sleep, she whispered the mostly Buddhist prayer in his ear while her hands formed the signs in front of him. He could barely articulate the words, pronouncing ‘possible universes’, pottible newnipurses, and although she was sure he understood little of what he was saying, he knew the prayer by heart.

  Cameron’s chubby hands reached for her, “’Night Jordan.” He said, pulling her in for a loud kiss.

  “Good night, slugger…” she murmured, wrapping her long arms around him and kissing him back.

  Catherine stepped forward, bending to wrap her arms around them both, “Good night, honey.” She smiled, kissing him.

  “’Night momma…” he mumbled as Jordan tucked the covers around him, the worn Glowworm toy on his left and his sister’s teddy bear on his right.

  “Sweet dreams…” Jordan murmured, checking the baby monitor on the nightstand before turning out the light.

  She finished her nightly habit of rechecking all the doors and windows and found Catherine sitting at the dining table in the kitchen area, bent over her tablet, “I thought you said no work before bed…”

  “I know…” she straightened, “but it was hard not to open some of the files once you forwarded them.” She held up a hand, “Don’t worry, I have no intention of looking at the gruesome pictures…”

  “I deleted them on your forward…” Jordan confessed.

  “Oh,” she blinked, scanning the email again, surprised she hadn’t noticed. “Well, thank you, that quick little flash in the auditorium was enough for me.” She turned her tablet around to face Jordan when she sat next to her, “I was reading the responding officer’s report; Sergeant Douglas made a very insistent point of the significance of the property where Nancy Ward’s body was left.” She shook her head, incredulous, “Nazi’s?”

  Jordan read a section Catherine had highlighted, “Well, I guess if no one concluded her murder was a hate crime before they certainly would have after reading this…”

  “So she was killed by a skinhead…”

  “Who knows?” Jordan shrugged, “I have no idea what direction this is gonna’ take…” she tapped the file closed, “That’s where you come in…” She powered the tablet down and stood, pulling Catherine to her feet and in for a kiss.

  “Mmm…” she hummed appreciatively, “why thank you, Agent Hawkins.”

  “I look forward to working with you, Doctor Bernard.”

  They strolled through the three-bedroom house to their bedroom, Jordan shutting off lights on the way. The house itself was roomy; when shown the place for the first time both women had remarked nearly simultaneously how they liked that it felt big without appearing cavernous. They loved the open design making the living room, kitchen and dining room one large area, surrounded by paneled walls of natural woods and an abundance of double-paned windows that made the house feel at once spacious and cozy.

  “Time to brush our teeth…” Catherine grinned, pulling her into the bathroom, “and get ready for bed.” She closed the door behind them and wrapped her arms around Jordan’s waist, “You did promise me some hanky-panky tonight.”

  Jordan snickered; “I did…” she murmured and pulled her in for a kiss.

  New York City, NY

  “Go ahead and work with Bea…” She sighed heavily while she drove, “I’ll pull you when I have the warrants.”

  Catherine gave the free hand between them a squeeze, “What?”

  Jordan shook her head, “I need a history of the dump site and since it began as a Nazi stronghold back in the day I’m gonna get on that first… it may take the longest…”

  She arched a brow, “Because…” she prompted.

  “Because Murphy Ranch was built in the thirties… by rich American Nazi sympathizers… and at that time J. Edgar Hoover ran the bureau…” She glanced from the road to give Catherine a look. “You know he ran the FBI for nearly fifty years like his own private secret police force.”

  “I never saw that movie…” Catherine shrugged, “but it was pretty accurate, huh?”

  “Unfortunately...” she nodded, “He helped people make valuable contributions to the investigative sciences but he broke the law whenever it suited him. Like Nixon he had an enemies list with people like Martin Luther King Junior on it.” The traffic slowed as they emerged from the Holland Tunnel and Jordan slowed the car, “He made stuff up so he could portray himself as a real hero…” her voice dripped with sarcasm. “And he told lies…” she threw Catherine another sideways glance, “on top of lies… I think he may have been the first corrupt public official to figure out the importance of the modern day shredder.”

  “So?”

  “So I’m not sure how much information I’m going to find in the bureau’s vault that would have survived his purge. He loved secrets, no matter what they were. President Truman compared the bureau back then to the Gestapo and said publicly that Hoover resorted to blackmail and sex scandals to achieve his own ends and would’ve given his right eye to take over…”

  “Take over what,” Catherine looked at her skeptically, “the country?’

  “Pretty much…” she nodded, “He was an extremely powerful man in Washington and enjoyed intimidating sitting presidents.” Her eyes flicked to the rearview mirrors to check on Cameron buck
led in his child seat in the back, “Every senator and congressman was terrified of him… I may not be able to dig up anything helpful about the dump site…” She threw her a teasing look, “You might have to do all the heavy lifting on this case.”

  She stared dully at her desk phone, “And you’re absolutely sure?”

  “Yep,” the archivist in the bureau’s vault snorted tiredly, “You know how it was back then.”

  “Yeah,” she sighed, “I do… and you’re sure there’s nothing else?”

  “I’m sure…” She could hear him clicking on his keyboard in the background, “You’re welcome to come look through the files yourself, but very little remains from that period, Hoover had most of them destroyed. Literally, all we have left of that particular case today is from a local newspaper; every piece of official bureau documentation is gone… but for all his power and control, he wasn’t able to erase popular news stories of the time, so I guess we’re lucky to have that tiny article… But you know, at that moment the entire country’s focus had already shifted to Pearl Harbor, so it got little coverage… everyone there was terrified the Japanese were going to land on their shore or bomb from the skies...”

  “Excuse me...” she interrupted, “did you just say Pearl Harbor?”

  He chuckled, “Oh yeah… wait till you read the article.”

  “Uh... okay,” Jordan replied uncertainly as she stared at her monitor, “I just got your email, thank you.”

  “Anytime,” he told her, “I’m just sorry there isn’t more.”

  Hoover… Jordan issued a silent snort of contempt as she hung up; it’s amazing the assholes this country’s had to endure… She drew a deep breath in through her nose and abruptly shut down her workstation. I might as well do this across the hall… She grabbed her tablet and phone and left the office. Easing the door open to check the auditorium was empty before slipping inside; she flicked on some lights and connected her tablet to the podium console. She quickly opened her email from the archivist and opened the attachment on the long, wall-sized screen; it was a picture file, a screen capture of an old yellowed newspaper clipping from the Los Angeles Times dated December 8, 1941:

  FBI raids Los Angeles ranch. Dozens arrested.

  She leaned an elbow on the podium as she read,

  “In the wake of the terrible attack on Pearl Harbor yesterday, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation stormed the Murphy Ranch early this morning in the Santa Monica hills, arresting dozens of followers of The Order of the Silver Shirts - members of the fascist group, the Silver Legion of America. The chief of the Home Guard division of the Los Angeles Police Department has declared that a Nazi spy, identified as Joseph Schmidt, was arrested when federal agents raided the Murphy Ranch. Chief Cormack reports that codebooks and evidence of secret radio transmissions to Germany were also discovered at the ranch.”

  “Shit.” Jordan moaned and circling around the podium, used her tablet to search the internet for information regarding the ranch’s history. After finding four articles, she placed them side by side on the wall screen and crossed the room to slump tiredly in the front row of the theater-style seats. She limply held the remote aloft and read each article completely before clicking it closed and moving on to the next. More than an hour passed when her phone vibrated,

  “Hawkins.”

  “Hey, Jordan, it’s Mare…”

  She recognized the voice of Agent Mary Fielding from the Scene Investigation Division, “Hey…” Jordan cleared her throat, “I’m still waiting for the warrant.”

  “Unbelievable,” she heard her moan, “I can get my guys out to her apartment in another hour, want to meet us there?”

  “As soon as I get the warrant, yeah.”

  “Okay, call me.”

  “The second I get it.” Jordan promised and hung up. Exhaling heavily, she began reading the next article about Murphy Ranch.

  There was a perfunctory knock on the door and Catherine entered, “Okay… I know my understanding of how this stuff works is based entirely on movies and TV until you set me straight, but does it always take this long to get a warrant in a murder case?”

  Jordan still sat slumped in the seat, “This would be the first time I’ve waited this long actually.”

  Her head jerked back as she sat next to her, “Really? Wow, that’s saying a lot right there…”

  “Stewart’s been calling them for me and he promises it’ll be any minute now.” She leaned tiredly over the arm of the chair and pressed a quick kiss against her lips, “How about I give you a review on what I’ve found so far on Murphy Ranch until he calls?”

  “Great…” Catherine settled back and Jordan stood, stretching,

  “So… because J. Edgar was such a secretive, ruthless bastard, all official FBI records of Murphy Ranch are missing...”

  “If they’re missing, how would you know the FBI had anything to do with the place?”

  “A bureau archivist sent me what he had,” Jordan clicked up the article on the screen, “this is a picture of a newspaper article that probably survived in the vault as an oversight because it was misfiled or something.”

  “Wow…” Catherine’s eyes widened as she read, “so clearly everyone knew about them up there on their ranch, but the FBI doesn’t make their move until the day after Pearl Harbor is attacked?”

  “That’s how we know there was an official FBI file that no longer exists. The archivists really don’t have much spanning that fifty year period; if they did I imagine a whole lot more people would work there. Anyway,” she shrugged, “everything I’m going to tell you now comes from contemporary articles and local historians; in 1933 Jessie Murphy purchased fifty-five acres between what is today known as Sullivan Ridge and Will Rodgers State Park. That much, apparently, is still public record. By 1938, it becomes known to locals that the real owners were a wealthy American couple, Norman and Winona Stephens; he was an engineer with financial interests in silver mining and Winona’s family, the Murphy’s, made a fortune in the thumbtack industry…”

  “Thumbtacks?”

  “Wait for it,” a small grin plucked at Jordan’s lips, “only real life gets this bizarre; this couple had a real attraction to National Socialism and Hitler's New Order in Germany.” She clicked open picture files of dilapidated buildings, “Winona was really into the paranormal, and she fell under the spell of a mysterious, Rasputin sort of character… a Nazi known locally as Herr Schmidt. He convinced Winona to shell out four million dollars of her family’s money on this place to build a massive compound that would house followers of the Third Reich…”

  She clicked up another series of modern day photographs of the ranch on the wide screen, “The plan was to build an infrastructure that would be enough for a small town, including concrete staircases, terracing, sprinklers, orchards, a 400,000-gallon water tank, a fuel tank, and a concrete-walled power station…”

  Catherine tilted her head from one side to the other, “The concrete walls on the water tank look like they’re at least a foot thick.”

  “Power station too,” Jordan nodded, “evidently the parks service debates tearing them down every few years but the concrete structures were fortified so heavily it would cost a fortune to destroy them so here we are eighty years later and it’s all still there.”

  Catherine gazed at the concrete power station covered in colorful paint, “The graffiti is kinda’ pretty…”

  “There were also plans for a four-story mansion,” Jordan continued, “the blueprints included twenty-two bedrooms, five libraries, and multiple dining rooms.”

  “Jesus.”

  She clicked up some photos showing long concrete staircases winding through the hills, “Hikers use these today, but back then the Silver Shirts used them to patrol the grounds… when the ranch was built the intention was to create a self-sustaining Nazi community. According to local rumor, Schmidt conducted séances and led paramilitary marches around the grounds.”

  “Really?” Catheri
ne shook her head, “I mean, I believe you, but my god, what morons.”

  Jordan snorted, “Agreed, so Schmidt convinced the Stephens’ and apparently anyone else who’d listen that his psychic powers had allowed him to divine that in the coming war with the axis that the German Master Race would destroy America. Their objective was to hole up on the self-sustaining ranch and one year after America's downfall, it would be safe to re-emerge into the wasteland that Los Angeles had become and establish an Aryan Civilization allied with Hitler and his Third Reich.”

  “And who’d get to run the country?”

  “William Dudley Pelley.” She clicked up a picture of an older man with a scarlet L emblazoned on his gray shirt. “As Adolph Hitler rose in power, he formed partnerships in the United States, including a group called the Silver Legion led by this guy,” she waved the remote at the screen, “Considered an extremist and spiritualist, Pelley founded the Silver Legion of America in 1933 and ran for president in 1936 for the Christian Party. Born in 1890 and largely self educated, he became a journalist and covered the war in Europe…”

  “The first world war?”

  “Yes, apparently he witnessed some nasty atrocities during the Russian Civil War that left him with an implacable hatred of both communism and Jews. He later became a screenwriter in Hollywood and wrote a lot of Lon Chaney movies.”

  “So he already lived in the area…”