Sentinels Read online

  I kept thinking about Rob Brompton being a black man. Nobody in Creekside had volunteered that information to me, nor, as far as I knew, to Ralph Fassbinder, and neither Fassbinder nor I had asked the right questions to bring it out. Now that I knew, certain things people had said to me on Tuesday—some subtle, some not so subtle—took on significance.

  Bartholomew, at the Northern Comfort: I never seen him. Girl came in for, the room. Otherwise—

  Art Maxe: Holding hands. Christ, even kissing on each other. And the spitting mouth he’d made afterward.

  Lena at the Modoc Cafe: Good-looking kid, not too dark . . . Couldn’t keep their hands off each other. In a place like this, in the middle of the Saturday dinner rush . . . stupid. Very stupid. Calling attention to themselves like that. These are the mountains, mister, not the big city.

  Was that the key circumstance, a good-looking young black man and an attractive young white woman forced to spend the night in a backwater like Creekside?

  One resident, or more than one, taking offense and then crossing the line into violence? And some kind of conspiracy of silence as a result?

  Or was there even more to it than that?

  I remembered other things too, now. Maxe saying in the Eagle’s Roost: These mountains, they got secrets nobody can find out. Lena telling me she’d seen Allison and Rob talking to two men after they left the cafe that Saturday night. The peculiar pair in camouflage fatigues and the camouflage Jeep who had nearly run me down. And the flyer that had been posted in the Creekside General Store—the flyer from the Christian National Emancipation League, an outfit “dedicated to purifying America of race-mixing and mongrelism, and to the emancipation of the white seed and the rise and rebirth of God’s Chosen People.”

  Chapter Ten

  I was up early again on Friday morning, on the road by seven-thirty. No rain, just broken clouds and cold winds. I drove straight down Highway 5 and reached Medford before ten. On the southern outskirts I located a service station that had a booth with a working telephone, and made two calls.

  The first was to the Lassen County Sheriffs Department. Ralph Fassbinder was in and still willing to cooperate with me. He’d been in touch with the Eureka police again earlier that morning, he said; they had smudged fingerprints and no other leads from the MG or the kids’ luggage. The car had been in reasonably good working order, so it hadn’t been abandoned for mechanical reasons. I explained what I’d learned in Eugene, gave him the address and phone number of Rob Brompton’s parents in El Cerrito. He thought they and Helen McDowell ought to be told the whole truth, meaning the interracial angle, and volunteered to do the telling. I was more than willing to leave the chore in his hands.

  The down side of the conversation was that he didn’t feel half as strongly as I did about the feasibility of race-related violence, or put much stock in my red-herring theory. It was plain that he believed, or wanted to believe, that Allison and Rob had driven her MG to Eureka and vanished there. Rural authorities tend to be protective of their own, and slow to give credence to acts of deadly force—hate crimes in particular—without irrefutable proof. I didn’t argue with him; it would only have turned him against me, and there might come a time when I would need his support. He didn’t ask if I was planning to return to Creekside, and I didn’t volunteer the information that I was headed straight there.

  Call number two went to my office. “I’m making some headway,” I told Tamara, “but the direction it’s taking isn’t good.” I filled her in on Rob Brompton, the discovery of Allison’s MG, and the inferences I’d drawn about Creekside and its citizens.

  There was a silence when I finished. Then, bitterly, “Damn niggers never learns, does they,” in an exaggerated dialect. “Don’t mess wif no white woman, or out come de sheets.”

  I let it pass. Any comment I made would only have sounded condescending.

  “Well, if that’s the way it is, truth’s got to come out.” Her normal voice, with an edge. And professional again too: “What can I do?”

  “Get me specifics on an outfit called the Christian National Emancipation League. Based in Modesto, address on Milltown Road. Head of it—‘grand pastor,’ he calls himself—is Richard Artemus Chaffee.” I spelled the last name for her.

  “ ‘God only loves whitey’ bunch?”

  “Yeah. I need a better idea of what kind—how large, how active, if they have any history of violence against minorities. And if there’s any direct connection between the league and anybody in Creekside, or the league and that part of the state.”

  “I can punch up some preliminary stuff right now, if you want to hang on . . .”

  “No, take your time and put together a complete package. Talk to Joe DeFalco, if you can reach him at the Chronicle; find out what he knows about the league.”

  “Will do,” Tamara said. “Want me to call you on your cell phone when I’ve got the package?”

  “Mobile reception is lousy in the mountains. Better if I call when I get to Creekside. Is there a number where I can reach you this afternoon?”

  “Right here. I’ll stick around until I hear.”

  “I thought you had a class Friday afternoon.”

  “I do, but this is more important.”

  “Thanks, Tamara.”

  “Stay cool.” She paused. “Maybe we’ll kick some bigot ass, huh?”

  “Maybe we will.”

  The rain clouds that had soaked Oregon the previous day had blown south into California. I picked up the stragglers just after I crossed the state line at Tule Lake, and it was raining hard enough coming through the Modoc National Forest to force my speed down to an average of forty. It was past one o’clock when I rolled into Alturas. I stopped there for gas and coffee to go, and at two-fifteen I was back in Creekside.

  Dismal little place under a wet gray sky: empty streets, the collection of frame and log buildings looking huddled and oddly insubstantial, as if they were sets built for a Hollywood location shoot. You had the feeling that the lights behind their windows were skillfully placed reflector lamps, that any door you opened would lead you not into a room but into more wet, gray daylight.

  I parked in front of the Creekside General Store. On the wall in front was a public phone in a plastic shell. I used it to ring Tamara’s line at the office. Busy. I could have rung the other office number—the listed line—but I didn’t want to interrupt her work. I hung up, went inside the store.

  The same heavyset woman was alone in there, doing something in one of the cramped aisles. I paused by the door to scan the corkboard affixed to the wall. The flyer I’d torn down on Tuesday had not been replaced.

  The woman came out to see who her customer was. No customer: trouble. Her eyes took on a refrigerated look. A rat in one of the produce bins would have gotten a warmer reception.

  “You again,” she said.

  “Me again.”

  “I don’t know any more’n I did the other day, so there’s no use in bothering me. Buy something or get out.”

  “How about a membership in the Christian National Emancipation League?”

  “. . . The what?”

  “There was a flyer on your bulletin board the last time I was here. Put out by the Christian National Emancipation League of Modesto. Who tacked it up?”

  “How should I know? People put all kinds of crap on that board. What you think it’s there for?”

  “But you never noticed the flyer.”

  “No, I never did.”

  “Don’t know what this league is all about.”

  “Mister,” she said, “I don’t know nothing about nothing.”

  But her eyes had flicked away from mine, to roam the close-packed shelves. She knew, all right. She knew about the Christian National Emancipation League and she knew who had put that particular piece of crap on her bulletin board.

  The Modoc Cafe was also empty of customers. Just the cook in back and Lorraine sitting in one of the booths with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. She
didn’t like seeing me again any more than the woman in the general store had. Nobody in Creekside, I thought, was going to like seeing me again. Not if I could help it.

  I asked her what time Lena came on; she said four o’clock. Then, “What you want with Lena?”

  “Few more questions.”

  “About what?”

  I smiled at her.

  She said, “Whyn’t you leave us alone, huh? Nobody knows what happened to those kids.”

  “Somebody knows, Lorraine. Somebody, somewhere.”

  She sat there, not saying anything, waiting for me to go away. I didn’t go away. Pretty soon she said, “Now what?”

  “A bowl of soup and a cup of coffee.”

  Heavy sigh. “What kind of soup?”

  “What kind have you got?”

  “Cream of road kill,” she said.

  “Is that supposed to be funny?”

  “Nothing’s funny around here anymore. We got split pea and chicken noodle, take your pick.”

  I picked chicken noodle. Another bad choice: I should’ve known better than to order anything swallowable at the Modoc Cafe. The coffee was bitter, the soup lukewarm and loaded with enough floating fat eyes to keep me from even sampling one spoonful; I don’t like to be stared at by my food. I didn’t summon Lorraine when I was ready to leave. Instead, I looked up the prices on the menu and left payment on the table. Exact amount, no tip.

  “I got the shit you wanted,” Tamara said. “And believe me, shit is the right word.”

  I shifted position, turning my back to the cold gusts of wind that blew in against the general store’s front wall. I’d have preferred to make the call inside somewhere, out of the weather, but the only other public phone in Creekside was in the Eagle’s Roost—too close to the bar for complete privacy.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Christian National Emancipation League,” she said. “Operating under that name for about three years, but founded ten years ago by this dude Chaffee. Used to be a salesman down in the Central Valley. Gave up his job and became a preacher in ’eighty-four, courtesy of one of those sham outfits that ordain by mail. Opened up a temple outside Turlock called Church of the Emancipator, preached a combination of fundamentalist religion and racist bullshit. Usual white-race-is-the-chosen-race garbage. Not many followers, not until he began to deemphasize religion and come down heavy on the white supremacist angle. That’s when the Church of the Emancipator turned into the Christian National Emancipation League.”

  “How many members?” I asked.

  “No way of getting an exact count. Doesn’t seem to be more than about a hundred.”

  “What’s their philosophy? Separatism through violence?”

  “Not openly.”

  “Not a militant outfit, then?”

  “Like I said, not openly. Man, these hate groups are all militant to one degree or another. Posse Comitatus, neo-Nazi Skinheads, the NAAWP, White Aryan Resistance, the fucking Klan . . . all of ’em.”

  “No direct surface links to violent acts or weapons offenses?”

  “Not that I could find. League doesn’t seem to be one of the real hard-line groups like the Aryan Brotherhood or those crazy assholes that blew up the Federal building in Oklahoma City or Butler’s ‘Heavenly Reich’ in Idaho. But under the surface . . . who knows?”

  “Did you find any connection between the league and Creekside?”

  “No. None.”

  “Or word of league activity in Modoc or Lassen counties?”

  “Same zero. Joe DeFalco’s checking out that angle. By the way, he wants you to call him soon as you can. Said to tell you he’ll be at his desk until five-thirty.”

  “He smells a story, right?”

  “What else?”

  DeFalco is an old-guard newspaperman, been with the Chronicle nearly a quarter of a century and in the game for forty years—the slide-by kind most of the time now, but high energy and tenacious as hell when it suits him. Which is when he figures he might be on to something that will benefit Joe DeFalco. The one ambition he has left is to win a Pulitzer Prize. He’ll never do it—he’s not that good—but it keeps him going. For all his faults, he’s a decent guy and a friend; and these days he likes me enough to do just about any favor without complaint, thanks to a fairly high-profile case I’d been involved in last fall, right after Kerry and I were married. He’d worked part of it with me, and been handed an exclusive for his help—his biggest story in years. He was still bitching about the Pulitzer committee’s failure to reward him for it.

  “I’ll give him a buzz when I get a chance,” I said. “Anything else?”

  “One thing, but not about the McDowell case.”

  “Other business?”

  “Well, you had a call just before noon. Kind of funny.”

  “Funny?”

  “Man said his name was Eberhardt.”

  That stopped me cold. “My ex-partner?”

  “Only Eberhardt you know, right?”

  “For Christ’s sake,” I said angrily. “What is this, old home week? Two calls from Barney Rivera and now out of the blue, Eberhardt. Of all damn people.”

  “Maybe they both want the same thing.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” Rivera had mentioned a personal matter and “a mutual friend,” and now this call. Who else but Eberhardt? “What’d he say?”

  “Not much. Want me to play the tape for you?”

  “No.” I had no interest in hearing his voice. “Just give me the gist of it.”

  “He asked for you and I told him you were out of town and he wanted to know when you’d be back. I said I didn’t know. He tried to get me to tell him where you were but I wouldn’t, not after that business six months ago. He was quiet so long I thought he was through talking, but then he asked would you be checking in sometime today. I said you would and he said tell you he’d appreciate a call back today or tomorrow, before Sunday.”

  “ ‘Appreciate a call back.’ Those exact words?”

  “Yep. ‘Tell him I’d appreciate a call back today or tomorrow, before Sunday. At my office or at home.’ ”

  “Why before Sunday?”

  “No explanation. He sounded kind of uncool.”

  “Uncool. Meaning what?”

  “You know, hesitant, like he wasn’t sure he ought to have called you up in the first place. You want his home and office numbers? He left ’em both.”

  “No. All right, what the hell. Go ahead.”

  I scribbled his office number in my notebook. He was still living in the same house on Elizabeth Street because the home number was still the same. I didn’t have to write that one down. It would have taken me a lot longer than three years to forget a number I used to call two or three times a week.

  “So that’s it from here,” Tamara said. “Anything more you want me to do?”

  “No. You can go ahead and close up.”

  “You need me later, I’ll be home tonight after six and most of the weekend.”

  “Okay.”

  “I mean it,” she said. “Ring up anytime. This one’s kind of personal, you know what I’m saying?”

  For a couple of seconds I thought, foolishly, that she was referring to Eberhardt. The McDowell case, of course—Allison and Rob. I said I’d be in touch if I needed her, and rang off.

  In the car I sat and watched the rain make tear-streak patterns on the windshield. Eberhardt. After more than three years of dead silence. A week before the wedding last fall, I’d given in to Kerry’s insistence and called him at home to invite him to attend our civil ceremony at Civic Center. He hadn’t been in, and I’d left a message on his machine. No return call. Kerry hadn’t gotten any more satisfaction from Bobbie Jean Addison, the woman he lived with. The two of them had once been friends too, and she’d spoken briefly with Bobbie Jean on the phone, and Bobbie Jean had begged off with a lame excuse. Neither she nor Eberhardt had even bothered to send a card.

  So what the hell was this?

  Three-plus year
s since he’d walked out on our business and our friendship, for complicated reasons that I thought I understood, even sympathized with, but that nonetheless angered and hurt and saddened me. He had problems, Eberhardt did, stemming from his years as a lieutenant on the SFPD and a serious error in judgment that only he and I knew about and that had led to his early retirement. Even though we never talked about it, I was a constant nagging reminder of the down side of his life, his shortcomings and his failures. He needed to be free of me in order to go on living with himself, and so he’d gone away and opened his own agency—Eberhardt Investigative Services, offices in a seedy building in the Mission. For three-plus years he’d made a shoestring go of it, thanks in large part to the largesse of Barney Rivera, but he had no real prospects for success, and in another two months he would be sixty years old. He still hadn’t married Bobbie Jean, despite the fact—or maybe because of the fact—that his plans for an elaborate wedding had precipitated our falling out. Whenever I thought about him, which was hardly at all anymore, it was in a brief and detached way, like the fishing recollections on Tuesday. Once I’d wondered if he was any happier or more content than he had been when we were together, if he’d found what he was looking for from the changes in his life. But I knew—not sensed, knew viscerally—that the answer to both questions was no.

  Why the call, after all this time?

  And why did he need to talk before Sunday? What could possibly have a two-day time limit?

  Ring him back and ask him.

  Sure. Simple. Except that I couldn’t talk myself into doing it. Not now, while I was in the midst of a sensitive investigation that required my full attention, no distractions. Not now, and maybe not at all.

  Too much time elapsed, too much water under the bridge. Too many slights, real or imagined. Too much baggage and too much hurt. The plain truth was, I wanted shut of Eberhardt now as much as he’d wanted shut of me those three-plus years ago. Had no desire to set eyes on him again, or to talk to him again, or, for my future peace of mind, to have him lurking like a phantom in the corners of my memory.