Half Moon Bay: A Novel (Clay Edison Book 3)
Half Moon Bay: Chapter 19

The regrettably named Hanging Gardens Senior Living Center was a split-level ecru box situated beneath the departure corridor for San Francisco International Airport.

I climbed the entrance ramp with ears plugged against the shriek of a 747 rising toward the Pacific. Talking to the desk nurse I heard the same plane return, eastbound, having made a U-turn over the water. The lobby windows shivered and the faux-brass pendant light began to sway like an admonishing finger.

I wondered if Buddy Hopewell had been deaf before he moved in.

I found him in the dayroom, ensconced in a wicker rocker, Weejuns three inches shy of the linoleum. Round as a turnip, in a denim shirt and jeans one shade lighter, silver belt buckle stamped with Navajo motifs. A high white mustache climbed up into his nostrils. Scant hair had been slicked to the side, spread for maximum coverage, and clamped in place with a headset.

“And that’s when I knew,” he said. “It was either him…or me.”

His audience consisted of four women, hanging on his words to the neglect of a television droning The Price Is Right. Buddy was the real entertainment. He might be old; he might be squat; but he had a pulse and was compos mentis.

The headset was black and chunky, like a halo that had rotted off. From one ear trailed a wire terminating in a microphone the size of a lipstick tube. Buddy paused his tale of derring-do to jab it in my direction. “Yes, young man.”

“I’m Ross Spitz’s friend,” I said.

A plane barreled low above.

Buddy shimmied down from his throne. “Don’t fret, gals, I won’t be two jiffs.”

We went to the dining room, all torn pleather and pressboard wainscoting that smelled of ketchup. I fetched water from the dispenser.

“Didn’t mean to break up the party,” I said.

“Ah, they’re not going anywhere.”

“Him or you, I’m assuming you won.”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” He raised his Dixie Cup to me.

Another departing plane shook the building. Throughout our conversation it kept happening, every few minutes. Buddy would lower the headset volume, wait five seconds, then dial it up again to continue talking.

He asked after Ross. I had to confess that I didn’t really know him.

“Good man,” Buddy said. “Fast learner.”

“He thought you’d remember the case.”

“Like it was yesterday. It’s yesterday I can’t remember for the life of me. How’s a coroner come to be involved?”

I told him about Peter. His face briefly lost its shine.

“That’s a damned shame. Here I thought you were going to tell me they finally found the girl’s body.”

“Mary Franchette.”

“Margaret. Not Mary. They called her Peggy. Where’d you get Mary from?”

“Her half brother, Norman.”

“Boy oh boy. That fella.”

“He’s my only source. Gene won’t talk. There’s nothing in the papers. We have no clue what happened to her.”

“What happened was she was kidnapped,” Buddy said. “Grabbed right out in the open. Family never got a ransom request, never heard nothing at all. She just up and vanished. This long, you tend to assume she’s dead. That’s what I thought you were going to tell me.”

“I couldn’t replace records at the local level, either about her or about the fire.”

“Yeah. Cause we took em all.”

“Took them?”

“Fire. PD. Whole kit and caboodle.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Well, listen. You need to—”

A plane chundered overhead. Buddy waited for the noise to fade, then settled into his raconteur’s pose. “Listen and learn, son.”

—

HE’D COME OUT of Abilene, Texas, starting at the Bureau in June of ’69.

“Hell of a time to cut your teeth. I was making ten thousand four hundred dollars a year, and I didn’t have this big gut. I did have a full head of hair and a royal blue Barracuda with racing stripes. I loved that car. Girls loved it, too. I’d cruise around and pick up coeds from San Francisco State. They didn’t like me cause I was the Man, but they sure as sugar liked that car.”

I pictured him tooling through the Haight, honking his horn and winking.

Once a ladies’ man, always a ladies’ man.

“Those days the Bureau was still Hoover’s kingdom. Out here on the West Coast, he couldn’t keep as close an eye on us, or do like he did in New York, drop in unannounced and scare the pants off the ASACs. What it amounted to was he harbored a degree of mistrust. He thought the hippie culture had a corrupting influence. Needless to say, everyone was pretty keen to demonstrate the opposite.

“My first boss, Francis Ingles—he was a Hoover man. Shameless suck-up. He’d show up for work in a trench coat and fedora, like some G-man out of central casting. All he did, all day long, was draft memos to SOG.”

I said, “Don’t know that one.”

“Seat of Government. That’s what they call the headquarters in DC. Any damn thing required a memo. Make a phone call, write a memo. Tie your shoes, scratch your balls, write a memo. First week I’m on the job, Ingles calls one of the agents into his office and starts laying into him for failing to complete a form in triplicate. Left his door open, so the rest of us would hear. ‘You’ve embarrassed the Bureau.’ No worse sin than that. I joined up to do police work, and here I am, watching a grown man grovel for using the wrong carbon paper. Meanwhile Ingles gets lost leaving the bathroom.”

I smiled.

“You know the kind of guy I’m talking about,” he said.

“I’ve met a couple.”

“Tiny dicks…The other thing to understand is context. You’ve got riots at the Democratic National Convention. You’ve got Abbie Hoffman and SDS, the Weathermen blowing crap up. Everyone’s on edge. Early 1970 is when it really started to heat up, because they blew up some police cars in Berkeley, and then they bombed the police station in Golden Gate Park.”

I’d read about the San Francisco bombing, but not the one in Berkeley.

“It didn’t get as much attention, because nobody died, but that’s dumb luck. Golden Gate, they killed a cop.”

Not long after, Gene Franchette’s house went up in flames.

“On its own, it’s not of interest to us. Private citizen, we wouldn’t necessarily have jurisdiction. But in light of recent events, it starts to look like part of a pattern.”

“Bomb the bomb-maker.”

“Bingo. Ingles got a giant hard-on.” He grinned. “Mebbe a medium one.”

“Why didn’t the Oakland office take it?”

“Ingles went over them. Technically they answer to San Francisco. He wanted guys he could control, so he threw it to me and another junior agent, Phil Shumway.”

“Seems like it would warrant more than a two-person operation.”

“We didn’t have a specialized response team like they do now. A case was high-profile enough or DC was in a generous mood, they might send out someone handy with forensics. They did that for Golden Gate. That’s where the bulk of the manpower was being concentrated. With Franchette, we had a situation that might be related, might not be. Ingles tapped us to do recon.”

“What’d you replace?”

“Not much. We didn’t make it to the scene till a couple of days after the fact. The place was an unholy mess by then. You ever try to collect evidence from a fire?”

“A few times.”

“That’s right, y’all had that awful business at the nightclub.”

“The Ghost Ship.”

“I read about it. Ugly.”

“It was.”

“Firemen…” He pursed his lips. “Lemme think how I can put this. Cause I have the utmost respect for what they do. Hell, you couldn’t pay me enough to run into a burning building. When it comes to preserving evidence, though, they are the absolute pits. Not their fault. They’re trying to put the damned thing out, spraying water and running around, trampling the place to bits. They’re not thinking about the consequences for an investigator.

“Me and Phil show up, there’s cinders shoveled onto the lawn, animals running every which way. Best we could tell, based on the char, the point of origin was inside the garage. We couldn’t replace any sign of an incendiary device. The Weathermen liked to use timers. They’d set it to go off at night and stick it in a vent. We didn’t have much in the way of training, mind you. But we didn’t see anything like that. No fuses, no wiring.”

“Doesn’t rule out something lower-tech.”

“Or a regular old pyro playing with matches.”

“What about an accelerant?”

“Not that we could detect. The science wasn’t what it is today, send in a pinprick and they tell you what brand it is and what the perpetrator had for lunch.”

“Forced entry into the garage?”

“No way to know. Anything that might prove it got destroyed. Dr. Franchette told us he’d leave the windows open at night on occasion, air it out from the stink of varnish. He kept a workshop in the corner. Lumber, a soldering iron, wood stain, paint thinner, the works.”

“That’s a lot of ways for a fire to start.”

“You bet. And once it caught, it went hell-for-leather. It’s a miracle the whole place didn’t burn down to the foundation.”

“How much of the house was destroyed?”

“I reckon half at least.”

“Did the Franchettes file an insurance claim?”

“It didn’t belong to them. The lab owns it, or did. They used it to put up visiting scholars. That’s how we got our foot in the door, by calling it an attack on federal property. As I recall, Dr. Franchette and his family had only been there a short while, while they looked for something more permanent.”

“To me that suggests the attack might not have been aimed at them specifically.”

Buddy nodded. “The place sat vacant a lot of the time. If it was arson, it’s possible whoever started it didn’t realize anyone was inside. Fact of the matter is, we never could be certain it wasn’t a pure accident.”

“The Franchettes got out okay.”

“They caught some smoke. Mrs. Franchette smelled it and woke up. She got Peggy and her husband, and they climbed out the bedroom window.”

Canvass hadn’t yielded any witnesses.

“Folks were in bed. You didn’t have ten thousand TV channels to keep you up.”

“When I went by the house, I ran into the neighbor. Diane Olsen. Ring any bells?”

Buddy shook his head.

“She’s lived next door most of her life. She was fifteen then. I asked her about it and showed her the picture of Beverly, and she clammed up and walked away.”

“Well,” he said. “I don’t know. Must’ve been a scary thing for a kid.”

His discomfort was evident. Talking to cops about their unsolved cases is always fraught. In theory, everyone recognizes the value of a fresh pair of eyes. Harder to accept that it’s your eyes that have staled.

A detective once charged me in a drunken fit. I’ve learned to tread lightly.

I asked Buddy if anyone had claimed responsibility for the fire.

“No. They didn’t, always. The Golden Gate bombing, for instance—nobody came out and said ‘We did it,’ but we knew who we wanted.”

“Was that your understanding here? A political gesture?”

“Ingles thought so. That’s why he had us jump on it and grab the files. He didn’t want anything getting out to the public. He was terrified of leaks.”

Days after Golden Gate, the San Francisco field office had received a tip that several of the Weathermen were hiding out on a boat up in Sausalito.

“Turns out someone’d tipped them off, too. Our guys got there prolly ten minutes too late. They found a cup of tea on the counter, hot, with the bag in it. When Hoover heard about that, he went bananas. He telexed the SAC, reaming him out.”

“And shit rolls downhill.”

“Law of nature.”

“At the risk of being rude,” I said, “if the boss was afraid of leaks, first place I’d look would be your office.”

Buddy chuckled. “Well, he couldn’t very well admit it might’ve been one of our guys. It was a big joint operation, remember. SFPD, state police. Could be anyone’s big mouth.”

“Except the FBI’s.”

“You’re a fast learner, too,” Buddy said. “From then on, everything had to be airtight, or look it. Ingles had me approach the firemen and the Berkeley cops. ‘Can we borrow your files? We need to make secure copies.’ ”

“They just handed them over.”

“Course they did. We’re the goddamned FBI.”

“What happened to them?”

“Hell if I know. I think Ingles had us stick em in a closet.”

This decision—and the casual air with which Buddy described it—brought to mind the Nordic Knights case: agencies hoarding secrets, with disastrous consequences.

“Nobody ever asked for them back,” I said.

“Maybe at first. Pretty soon they stopped. You ever met a cop who begged for more work?” He paused, a hint of wariness in his grin. “Aside from yourself.”

With the physical evidence inconclusive, Buddy and Phil had turned to motive.

“Ingles was pushing the political angle, so we ran down the local radicals.”

“Must’ve taken a while.”

“You betcha. You couldn’t walk down the street without tripping over a revolutionary. I couldn’t tell you everyone we spoke to. We whittled it down to a short list. The one I liked was this gal, Janice Little. She and her boyfriend lived in a co-op, baking bread and weaving baskets outta armpit hair. They weren’t part of the Weathermen, but they ran in some of the same circles, and she’d been picked up on a couple of occasions trespassing near the lab. Once they caught her fooling around by the fence with matches and lighter fluid. She claimed she was having a picnic. She didn’t have any food on her, though. What’s on the menu? Barbecued lizard? We brought her in, boyfriend, too, and put em through the wringer. We didn’t have anything to hold them.”

“What about personal motives? Norman Franchette, or Claudia or Helen.”

“We talked to Norman, sure. Matter of fact he came to us. He was practically begging us to arrest him.”

“Why would he do that?”

“He liked to bluster. Maybe he thought it’d get him laid, saying he was wanted by the FBI. We interviewed him a bunch. For a little bit we even put a tail on him. Worst thing he ever did was buy skin mags. It was clear he was puffing his chest out. But that was when we were asking about the fire. Then Peggy went missing and his tune changed real quick.”

That surprised me; Norman had denied knowing the baby’s fate.

“Horseshit,” Buddy said. “Of course he knew.”

My mind raced back through the conversation in the record store. “Makes me think he was bullshitting when he got her name wrong. Putting distance between him and her.”

“Could be. On the other hand, he did smoke a lot of dope. I didn’t like his attitude, but we had nothing that would stand up.”

I mentioned the incident at the lab and Norman’s attempt to visit his half sister.

Again I saw Buddy squirm. “News to me.”

“The fight happened a few years prior, and I’m thinking Gene declined to press charges, which is why you never heard about it. Norman’s not going to volunteer information that puts him in a bad light.”

“Well, fine. But I interviewed Chrissy a whole bunch of times and she never said anything to me about him coming to the house, either.”

A new name. “Chrissy’s the babysitter.”

“Nanny. Chrissy Klausen.”

“Norman sounded a little in love with her.”

“She was a nice-looking gal, no two ways about it.”

“What about her? Was she a suspect?”

“She alibied out for the fire, out of town. The kidnapping, she was our primary witness.”

On July 25, 1970—the eleventh anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, and approximately four months after the fire at the Franchette house—the Bay Area’s third bombing of the year took place, at the US Army installation in the Presidio.

Three days later, Chrissy Klausen took Peggy Franchette out for a walk. The family had since rented a new house in a neighborhood farther south. Chrissy headed for a nearby park, the name of which escaped Buddy.

“It had a big slide made of concrete,” he said, snapping his fingers.

“Codornices.”

“That’s the one. What fool uses concrete for a slide?”

“My wife grew up going there. It’s a Berkeley institution.”

“Institution of what? Brain damage? Mebbe that’s the reason they’re soft in the head. No offense to your wife.”

It was a chilly, foggy Bay Area summer morning. At seven a.m. the park was deserted. Chrissy and Peggy had made several trips down the slide and were climbing up the hill for another round.

“She notices these two guys, one white and the other black, following them. They reach the top, where there’s sort of a platform, and the men rush them. The black guy wraps her up. The other guy grabs Peggy, sticks her under his arm like a football, and takes off. The black guy tries to leave, too, but Chrissy grabs his leg and hangs on, and he starts whaling on her till she has to let go. Meanwhile the first guy jumps into a car with the girl.”

“Did she get a plate?”

“It was too far away to read. All she could say is that it was a sedan, navy blue or black. Bear in mind, she’s getting the tar beat out of her. The guy shoves her off the platform, she goes tumbling, crashes into a tree, and breaks her leg.”

Her screams attracted the attention of a man walking his dog. By the time he had gotten to a pay phone, and made the call, and a squad car had arrived, and the patrolman had taken a statement and called a detective and notified highway patrol; by the time the news had made it to Buddy’s desk—

“We didn’t stand a chance.”

Twenty-four hours ticked by.

“Today you’ve got Amber Alert, traffic cameras, the computer. Her face’d be everywhere. Ingles didn’t even want her name in the papers.”

“Because of leaks?”

“In part. The rule we followed was you keep a tight lid, cause you don’t want to encourage the kidnappers and lend credence to their cause, or spook em so bad they panic and kill the victim to be rid of her. The thinking started to change with Patty Hearst, due to who she was. Me and Phil called the editors, and they agreed to hold the story back. You could do that. Trouble is, now we’ve got a barrel of nothing to go on.”

Two days. Three. A week.

“We kept waiting on a phone call,” Buddy said. “Ransom note, letter to the press.”

A month.

“We brought in the same people we talked to after the fire. Norman included. We talked to sex maniacs, guys with priors, guys on parole, on probation. Matching vehicles. Everything moved slower then.”

After two months and still no word from the kidnappers, the decision was made to appeal to the papers. But they’d waited too long. The story was stale.

“They stuck it on the back pages. I wanted to try and drum up some interest but Ingles kiboshed it. He didn’t want the angle to become how we’d screwed up.”

Three months. Six.

“Bev’d phone me up and ask if there had been any progress. She never raised her voice, like folks do. Almost wish she had. She was so quiet, it felt like a feather in my ear. Made my skin crawl.” Hastening to add: “Not her. Just what she reminded me of.”

By the one-year mark, they no longer expected a note or a letter, just a body.

“It bothered the hell out of me we couldn’t give them even that much. Then they left town, she called less. Some point she stopped altogether. I reckon she got busy with her new kid. I don’t suppose it makes up for the loss, but…I’m glad they were able to have another.”

“She didn’t tell you when Peter was born.”

“It wasn’t that way. We didn’t have a personal…I tried to do right by her. I always tried to do right. I never did get a great read on her. She was doped up most of the time.”

“On what?”

“Mother’s little helpers. All the ladies did them. I remember we asked her if she had any enemies. That’s where you start, right? What you ask anyone. Most folks go, ‘Oh no, not me, I get along with everyone.’ They think too highly of themselves to consider anyone’d want to hurt them. Funny thing about Bev, she goes: How could she have enemies if she didn’t have any friends? And you know what, I believed her. She was just lonesome as hell.”

Beverly Franchette, crying in the library stacks.

“What about Gene? Did he ever call you?”

“Not much. Men of that generation, it wasn’t their way to get hysterical.”

“I understand he could be abrasive.”

“He was never anything but polite to me.”

“And cooperative.”

“Fully.”

“You didn’t have reason to suspect either he or Bev were involved in some way.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Norman said Gene didn’t want to start dealing with a baby at his age.”

“Baloney. They had another, didn’t they? You can’t believe a word that moron says.”

“If I’m understanding you, the premise from the outset was that the two cases were connected.”

“That’s correct.”

“You also said the fire might’ve been an accident.”

Buddy bristled. “I said we couldn’t come down firm on either side. But come on, now. You got to use common sense. The fire’s a month after the Golden Gate bomb. Then you get the Presidio bombing and the kidnapping three days apart. What’s the alternative?”

“Bad luck.”

“I’ve never heard of luck that bad.”

I had. Most coroners would say the same. But we draw on a biased sample.

“Look,” he said, “you ever been to that park?”

“A few times.”

“You ought to know, then. The slide’s back from the street a hundred fifty yards. They didn’t just wander in and grab the first kid they saw. It was planned. They went right after them. That sound to you like a crime of opportunity?”

He waved his cup at me. “You mind?”

I brought a refill from the dispenser. He gulped it down.

“Shit,” he said, wiping his mouth, “it’s a sore subject. Don’t tell me you ain’t got one of those.”

“More than one.”

“I’m not saying we didn’t make mistakes, either.”

“I get you. And really, I’m just spitballing. I’m here to learn.”

He nodded abstractedly.

I said, “Besides race, could Chrissy describe the men?”

“Nothing we could work with. Her memory was in pieces—what you expect from a woman fighting for her life. I went to see her in the hospital. Her ribs’re broke, her leg’s broke, her face is a bloody mess, she can hardly breathe from the pain, and she keeps on apologizing, over and over.”

“For what?”

“She was burning up with guilt. She loved that girl. One thing I’ve learned over the years,” he said, “it’s the decent folks can’t stop blaming themselves, while the bad ones go around with a spring in their step. Later we sat her down with a sketch artist. We even had her hypnotized, if you can believe that.”

“Any other eyewitnesses?”

“It was too early in the day for most folks to be out. The guy walking his dog, he saw a dark sedan go by in a hurry. But he couldn’t be sure, and he couldn’t give us a plate, either.”

Within a few years Buddy had shifted his focus to white-collar crime. Phil Shumway transferred to Boston. Periodically they’d get on the phone to revisit the case.

“Sort of a ritual we had.”

“Are you in touch with him?”

“Phil? No. He passed on.”

“When was that?”

“Early nineties, I think. I don’t rightly recall. Maybe it was ’89.”

As statutes of limitations began to run out, some of the radicals who’d been living underground began to resurface. Time makes the best truth serum, but everyone Buddy had ever spoken to was adamant in their denial, regardless of what else they admitted to.

Peggy Franchette’s case went to pending inactive status.

“It didn’t mean much, practically. We’d dried up long before.”

He slumped in his chair, stray hairs stuck to his damp forehead. We had ventured onto a portion of the map he did not possess, waters churning with hindsight and regret.

A band of light slanted on the wall. Suddenly it began to tremble; the foam ceiling tiles danced in their frames and shed tiny particles that descended like ash. From an unseen sky, the shriek came crescendo. As it reached its punishing apex, I noticed Buddy’s hands clenched in his lap. He kept them there, not bothering to lower the volume, and I could only guess how loud and terrible was the clamor in his head.