Kill Signal, page 6
part #1 of Marko Bell Series
Rafe Strauss was, in fact, quite stupid.
INFORMANT #20. THE POLICE SERGEANT
Rafe had done considerably more than simply ask a cop at Northern Station about La Traviata.
In fact, Rafe shared Roland Solorzano’s testimony in detail with the cop.
Who then eagerly shared the gossip with his boss, the sergeant at Northern Station.
Who turned out to be extremely interested in Rafe Strauss’ story.
Unbeknownst to Rafe, every month for the previous two years, the sergeant at the Northern Police Station received an anonymous money order in the mail for several thousand dollars.
The man who contacted the sergeant by phone two years before, and whom the sergeant didn’t know, explained to him in a brief conversation that the monthly checks would continue to arrive for the rest of his life, on one condition: If he ever learned of anyone inquiring into the La Traviata massacre in North Beach two years before, he had to perfectly execute a series of pre-arranged steps.
As long as he did that, the checks would continue to arrive. Several thousand dollars. Every month. For the rest of his life.
The checks allowed the sergeant to live far beyond his means. To send his children to top private schools. To take his wife on expensive cruises and vacations. To buy luxury cars and fine clothes.
At first the sergeant was troubled by this arrangement. Who were these people? Why had they chosen him? And what had he gotten himself into? But for two years the checks kept coming, and no one asked him about the specific event the man had mentioned.
Soon, any unease he felt about the arrangement faded away. Perhaps, he thought, the checks really would keep coming forever, and he would never have to actually do anything to hold up his end of the bargain.
Then, two nights ago, a cop in his precinct shared a story he had heard from Rafe Strauss, about La Traviata and the mayor. The sergeant at Northern Police Station realized that the conditions that would trigger the pre-arranged sequence of steps were being met. This was his moment to hold up his end of the deal.
He considered just ignoring it. But he was afraid that they would find out somehow and that the checks would stop coming. Or maybe something worse would happen. He didn’t know who these people were and he didn’t know what they were capable of.
He made sure to remember the protocol they had taught him. The mysterious voice on the other end of the phone had made it very clear that if he screwed it up, they would find someone else to take thousands of dollars a month.
So the sergeant at Northern Station executed the first step: He had immediately placed an advertisement in the classified section of the Chronicle, with the specific wording the man on the phone had told him to use.
Then he waited.
At 9 a.m., the call came. He picked up the telephone and heard a voice. He believed it was the voice of the man who had called him two years before. The voice said one word.
“Speak.”
The sergeant’s heart raced. He wanted the money to keep coming. He also feared angering these people. He sensed they were dangerous.
Remember the protocol.
The sergeant cleared his throat and spoke.
“Rafe Strauss, the political operative who works for Maurice Weathersby, has been asking questions about La Traviata,” the sergeant said, his heart nearly beating out of his chest. “The reason he was asking is that the mayor’s driver told Strauss and Maurice Weathersby that he had overheard the mayor talking to Wayne Bordelay on the night of the massacre. That is all.”
The sergeant from Northern Station heard a click on the other end of the line, and after a few seconds he hung up. He sat at his desk and realized he was sweating profusely. He replayed in his mind what he had said, making sure he had followed the protocol exactly. He was satisfied that he had.
A few days later the man’s money order arrived as usual, and within a few weeks he had stopped looking over his shoulder for sudden threats materializing out of nowhere.
The tall man with the mustache listened to what the sergeant at Northern Station had to say.
Then he hung up the phone.
It had been two years since the Brotherhood had acted, and he was satisfied that the system still worked perfectly.
He had checked the classified advertising section of the Chronicle the previous morning, as he had every day for the past 42 years. Only a handful of times had it contained the message he was looking for.
Yesterday had been one of those days.
Once he saw the message, he knew who had posted it. He had committed to memory all thirty-seven members of the Network, and the unique messages those thirty-seven members had been assigned. The sergeant at Northern Station was one of the thirty-seven members.
As soon as the tall man with the mustache saw the ad, he called the sergeant. Once he had received the information he needed from the sergeant, he had contacted the operative.
The tall man with the mustache lingered over the story in that morning’s Chronicle, which told of the mayor’s driver plunging to his death at Devil’s Slide. The operative had done his job.
Threat averted.
The tall man with the mustache smiled as he remembered the fear he had heard in the voice of the sergeant from Northern Station.
Fear was good. He wanted the members of the Network to be afraid. He knew that the combination of fear and greed was ideal for keeping them compliant.
And if any of the thirty-seven members of the Network decided they wanted to report the arrangement to someone, that was no problem. The tall man with the mustache had created a system that would leave no trace of the Brotherhood.
An ad placed in the newspaper, a kill signal, which would hold meaning only for him.
A call from a burner cell phone that could not be traced.
The Network didn’t know who he was, or what the Brotherhood was.
They never would.
The Brotherhood had acted five times in its history. Three times in 1970, once two years ago, and now.
Despite the smooth functioning of the system he had built, the tall man with the mustache felt a slight disturbance.
Perhaps it was just nerves, caused by being so close to their final goal after all these years.
Yet he sensed more kill signals were coming.
There was a threat out there, somewhere in San Francisco, that could still undo everything.
And the Brotherhood would do anything to extinguish the threat.
Chapter 9
“I can’t imagine how I might help you solve a murder, Inspector Yancey,” Bernie Looman said. “I’m just an old newspaper reporter who finds himself in unexpected circumstances.”
Karen looked around the small, still room – the lounge area of the Willow Springs Assisted Living Center, twenty miles south of San Francisco, in the quiet town of Burlingame. She sat across from Looman, a small table between them. He was frail, and a threadbare blanket covered his legs as he sat in his wheelchair.
“My wife died six years ago,” Bernie Looman continued, in a hoarse, precise voice. “My children are all grown and moved away. They make sure the checks arrive on time and they call every few weeks if they remember. At Christmastime they fly me out to New York, or Houston, or Seattle for a few days and half-heartedly try to convince me to move in with them. But I know they are hoping I will refuse their offer. And so I do.”
Karen had started the morning at the University of San Francisco, where she interviewed a woman in the registrar’s office who gave her contact information for all Donna Bell’s teachers. She tracked down most of them and conducted phone interviews that didn’t yield much. Donna, a child psychology major, was friendly and studious but they didn’t know her particularly well, and Karen’s questions about Telegraph Hill and the Fieldings yielded nothing.
The one professor who likely knew her best was her graduate advisor, Dr. Prasad, but he was traveling in India and unreachable.
Karen left the university, empty-handed for now, and drove down the peninsula. She had tuned to the all-talk radio station, where her name led the news at the top of the hour. The breathless reporter hit all the main points in Danny Cannon’s story in the paper that morning.
She was desperate. Just desperate enough to grab onto that eerie, psychotic voice on the phone as a possible salvation.
Danny Cannon shouldn’t have been poking into the Fielding murders.
A twinge of guilt passed through her; Bernie Looman knew nothing of the self-preservation that had brought her to the dusty retirement home where he was spending his final years. She pushed the feeling away. “This seems like a nice place,” she said.
He looked at her with gently reproachful eyes. “It’s quite alright, Inspector Yancey. There’s no need to cheer me up. I’ve made peace with my lot. Now, how can I help you?”
Karen nodded in apology. “I contacted you because I was hoping to speak with someone who has knowledge of local history.”
He straightened in his wheelchair. “When I was a bit younger I was considered something of an authority. The Chronicle’s unofficial historian, if you will.”
“I’m interested in something that happened back in 1969,” Karen said. “The Fielding murders. The Chronicle had a few stories about it, but I was wondering if you remembered the case.”
Reading old newspaper stories on microfilm in the Main Library that morning, Karen felt a chill reading the accounts of the crimes. In February 1970, just after the tragedy of their two-year-old daughter falling to her death from the deck of the family’s Telegraph Hill mansion, Baxter and Elaine Fielding had been stabbed to death in their beds in the same home.
Actually, stabbed to death didn’t begin to describe it. They were hacked to pieces. Homicide inspectors who worked the case said it was the most brutal crime scene they had ever witnessed. Written on the walls of the Fielding’s mansion were three phrases: ‘Revolution,’ ‘Power to the People,’ and ‘Kill the Pigs.’ The phrases were written in the Fieldings’ own blood.
“Ah yes, the Fielding murders. Such a horrible event. And so odd that after all these years, two people visit me and ask about it, within days of each other.”
“Danny Cannon.”
“Yes,” Looman said with a slight chuckle. “I’ve known Danny for quite a long time. I have to admit he knows nearly as much about local history as I do. These days, that institutional knowledge is in short supply. I just wished he used his knowledge in more, shall we say, responsible ways.”
“You mean he’s unethical.”
“There have been stories about him skirting some journalistic conventions.”
Karen’s pulse quickened. Karen wondered where Cannon got his tip about the Fielding murders and their possible connection to the La Traviata massacre.
“Do you know of any example of lack of ethics with regard to his reporting on this story?”
Bernie Looman looked at Karen coolly. He had been a newspaperman for decades and was no stranger to the ways in which cops and journalists walked an uneasy line between cooperation and hostility. Karen knew he might be more likely to side with a fellow journalist against a cop whose aims, Bernie Looman must have already sensed, were not entirely driven by the facts of the case. Karen could see that she’d underestimated him.
“Inspector, I’m not sure what you’re getting at,” Looman said. “Or what particular agenda you have when it comes to these murders from nearly fifty years ago. My feeling about Cannon notwithstanding, I’m not aware of him doing anything unethical in his reporting of this case.”
Karen realized she had angered him. “Of course,” she said. “I’m sorry, Mr. Looman. I won’t lie, I don’t like Danny Cannon very much. But I do have a legitimate interest in this case.” She felt she was still fudging the truth a little. But she hoped Looman would give her a second chance.
He gazed at her for a few seconds as though deciding whether to trust her. Finally his features softened. “Inspector, you’re fortunate that I don’t get many visitors. I’ll answer your questions.”
Bullet dodged.
“Would you mind telling me what you remember about what happened to the Fieldings in 1969?”
“What I remember was that the city was terrified. Particularly the San Francisco establishment. The moneyed families who lived on Nob Hill, Pacific Heights, Telegraph Hill, Seacliff. You weren’t alive yet, but this was just after the Manson family murders down in Los Angeles. It sent shock waves. And of course you had all the hippies in the Haight District. The flower power generation, and the dark undercurrent of all that peace and love. There was a sense that some dark malevolent force was building in the country. It was all very unsettling. That was why the Fielding case shook everybody up so much. You can be sure security alarm sales went through the roof in this town – especially in the exclusive districts.”
“Did you know the Fieldings?”
“Not personally, no. But they were a prominent couple. Baxter Fielding had been named U.S. Ambassador to Norway, a juicy assignment for which I’m told he had lobbied for years, through his various national political connections and many campaign contributions. In San Francisco they were boldface names. They were the type of people that would show up in the society columns. The opening of the symphony and the opera, that sort of thing. Extremely wealthy. If I’m not mistaken the money came from his side of the family. They moved here just after the Gold Rush from back east and became bankers. The Fielding men didn’t do a very good job of procreating, and Baxter was the last male of the clan. He and Elaine lived in the old family house on the hill. And died there.”
Bernie Looman sighed somberly, a dry rasping sound. “It does seem to be a family whom tragedy has sought out, doesn’t it? First their baby daughter, and later Baxter’s sister.”
Karen’s eyebrows shot up. “His sister?”
“I’m sorry, Inspector Yancey, I thought you knew the history. Baxter Fielding’s only sibling, his older sister Jean, an elementary school teacher, committed suicide a few months after the Fieldings were killed. July, I believe. She shot herself in her apartment on Lombard Street.”
Karen visualized a timeline. Rebecca Fielding in December 1969. Baxter and Elaine Fielding in February 1970. Jean Fielding in July 1970. She reminded herself to not jump to conclusions. Collect facts, her father used to tell her. Don’t judge them. She decided to go back to the beginning.
“Why was Rebecca left with a babysitter overnight?”
“The Fieldings were in Oslo on a diplomatic trip. So they left the baby with Nora.”
“The babysitter.”
“Yes. She was just twenty years old. They found marijuana in her system.”
“Odd, isn’t it, that they left such a young child with a babysitter for extended periods.”
“By today’s standards, very much so. Perhaps not so unusual then. You know, of course, that Nora wasn’t just the Fielding’s babysitter.”
“What do you mean?”
“Her parents died when she was quite young, both from long illnesses. They lived in the Fillmore District and were involved in local politics. They ran a community nonprofit that was closely tied to the local Democratic party. The Fieldings were good family friends. They took her in. Adopted her, if you will, though I don’t think they did it officially. The poor girl had nowhere else to go.”
Nora wasn’t just Rebecca’s babysitter: She was her older sister, albeit an adopted one. It made more sense now that she would be consumed with grief and guilt.
“Why didn’t the papers write more about it? The whole thing – Nora, Rebecca, the Fieldings …”
“The Fieldings were powerful people, connected to the very upper reaches of high society in San Francisco. It was generally felt that no one should dig too deep into such a terrible tragedy, lest it reveal some less-than-savory details.”
“What kinds of details do you mean?”
“The San Francisco ruling class was very insular and very powerful in those days. I remember our editors telling us we should leave the story alone. They felt there was nothing more to be said about it. My sense at the time was that some pressure was brought to bear on them, from some very powerful forces. I can’t prove it. But I remember thinking there was more to the story than we knew.”
“Do you recall anyone else at the paper who had an interest in the case.”
“Yes, there was Donald Kanczynsky. A metro reporter, rather young and ambitious. He grumbled quite a bit about his editors’ lack of interest in the story. We sat next to each other in the newsroom. He even did some behind-the-scenes digging, until the editors found out. He was suspended. And the editors forbade him from spending any more time on the case, saying he was ignoring his other assignments. I remember Donald saying that was nonsense.”
“Did he continue looking into the case?”
“If he did, it wasn’t for very long. You see, shortly after his suspension, he was shot dead in the Western Addition housing projects. Apparently a drug deal gone bad. Donald was identified by some of the local residents as a regular buyer of heroin.”
“Did you know he was using drugs?”
“No, I didn’t. But Donald was part of that generation. He had begun to grow his hair long and was fully partaking, shall we say, of the countercultural experience.”
“In the late sixties that usually meant smoking pot and going to a Grateful Dead concert at the Fillmore, didn’t it? Not buying heroin in the Western Addition.”
“That was my impression as well. But things were changing so quickly in those days. And LSD had become a major factor. So maybe it wasn’t such a big step to heroin.”
“Do you believe that he was shot in a drug deal gone bad?”
He waited a few seconds to respond. “I was shocked when I heard the news. I didn’t want to believe it. But as I said, people saw him regularly visit the projects to buy drugs. So I suppose I accepted it.”
After that Bernie Looman’s energy started to fade. Karen got the feeling he had exhausted all his memories and impressions about what happened in 1969 and 1970. She left the retirement home and got back on 101.
