77th Street Requiem Read online

  “Cop killings aren’t my thing.” Jack shrugged dismissively. “I usually cover rock groups.”

  “I didn’t ask you to be here, Jack. You came to me. Where’s your car? I’ll be happy to drop you off. Want me to write a note to your editor: artistic differences? Get you off the hook?”

  “No way.” He backed off. “Sorry. I guess that came out wrong. I’m committed to do this story.”

  When I say “committed” the way he did, it usually means I’ve already spent my advance.

  Jack opened his backpack and pulled out a nice Nikon. “I’d like to get some shots of the house. Do we have a minute?”

  “Sure,” I said. Did they pay him extra for pictures? “We have five or ten minutes. Go ahead.”

  We both got out of the car. While Jack walked around, playing with the angles, I leaned across the car trunk, itching to get a look inside that house. There was no way I would cave in and do dramatization, but, say I did; I thought I would recreate Patty Hearst walking out the door of the yellow shack with her teammates, William and Emily Harris—the three survivors who might be able to tell me what happened to Roy Frady that night.

  I was beginning to worry that the whole project was too personal to me. That I had lost my objectivity.

  When Patty Hearst was a student at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1974, my father was a teacher there. As a kid, I spent a lot of time in the campus grove named for Patty’s great-grandmother, Phoebe Apperson Hearst, grande dame of the millionaire Hearsts, mother of William Randolph, founder of the university. Everyone knew about the Hearsts, but most of us had never heard of Patty until she was kidnapped in her underwear by the Symbionese Liberation Army.

  The ersatz army that took her was no more than a handful of middle-class kids playing at revolution, led by an escaped con who played them for suckers. The name on the con’s rap sheet was Donald DeFreeze, but he called himself Cinque after a slave rebel, and gave the others revolutionary monikers, too. He taught his recruits how to swear and how to shoot, gave them a politically correct front man for an uprising.

  The group were not nice kids led astray or seduced by a pied piper. Though they were college graduates and came from nice families—the offspring of a doctor, a minister, a rich merchant, some teachers, an engineer—for the most part they were alienated, unlovable loners or otherwise members of the clueless fringe who never quite get it unless someone shows them the way.

  Take Nancy Ling Perry, a rich kid who dropped out, turned on, and danced topless, sold her skinny body, and shoplifted to support a failed musician husband and twin heroin habits. The SLA got her off heavy drugs and into heavy crime, made her a leader for the first time in her life, unless you count being a high school cheerleader.

  From what I’ve learned, Perry found a lot of humor in mayhem, laughed when she blasted the superintendent of Oakland public schools, Marcus Foster, into heaven, laughed when she pistol-whipped Patty Hearst’s lover during the kidnapping.

  Minutes after neighbors heard the six shots that killed Roy Frady, a 1968 or ’69 green Buick Riviera with three or four people inside sped down the alley behind the death house. Neighbors remembered hearing someone inside the car laughing as it passed by.

  Patty Hearst was only a few years older than me when she was snatched at gunpoint from the condo she shared with her lover. She and I shared a zip code at the time. I was at once terrified and fascinated by what happened to her: innocent girl stolen from her home by terrorists. Her parents agonized and forgot they had ever fussed about her living in sin. When she publicly joined her captors in a fatal bank robbery a few months later, I felt as if I’d been hit by lightning. She robbed a bank, for chrissake, when I still had to be in by midnight.

  The kidnapping coincided with the moment I reached the full flower of my requisite adolescent rebellion. Though I never seriously considered joining any of the wannabe people’s armies floating around my hometown—I remember that late phase of radicals as being a grubby, hairy, argumentative bunch of stoners—there was still, in my young mind, because of my older, charismatic sister’s radicalism, a certain romance attached to those who went underground to reshape the world. Patty Hearst, the beautiful young woman seduced into terrorism, was, in my mind, the most romantic radical of them all.

  For another thing: while my parents never let up on me, Patty’s parents never gave up on her.

  By May of 1974, the accumulated charges against the SLA included murder, arson, armed bank robbery, kidnapping, and at least three pages of illegal weapons allegations. After the Hibernia Bank robbery, the search for the SLA heated up. When I was on the dean’s list, Patty and company were on J. Edgar Hoover’s wanted list.

  For a while, the nine core members of the SLA holed up in a roach-infested apartment in San Francisco. When it got too hot, and too uncomfortable—not enough food, dirty clothes, nosy neighbors—they decamped and came to Los Angeles, where Cinque had spent some of his youth as a criminal.

  They drove all day, and, late on the night of May 9, 1974, Nancy ling Perry found this shack at 833 West Eighty-fourth Street and the SLA nine moved in: two rooms, seventy dollars a month, no electricity, and no questions. When they moved in, they brought with them nearly two dozen guns and six thousand rounds of ammunition, nine sets of handcuffs, as well as the material to make pipe bombs, one of their signature toys.

  Which brings us to the problem of laundry, the SLA, and Roy Frady.

  So what I was thinking about as I leaned against my car was what this group of middle-class youth would do on their first day in a new house with the pressure off for the first time in a month. To me, it was obvious: the market, the laundry.

  An old woman stopped on the sidewalk beside the car and stared first at Jack, and then at me; gave us the death stare. When she got around to talking, she said, “No white people supposed to be in this neighborhood.”

  I straightened up, took a step toward her. “Have you lived here a long time?”

  She folded her arms across her ample chest and challenged me. “What you want?”

  “Just looking at that house,” I said. “White people once lived in that house. Do you remember them?”

  “And ain’t they all dead?” she said. “You best get to steppin’.”

  “Then you do remember them,” I said. “Did you live here back then? Did you ever see them?”

  She frowned and glanced back at the yellow shack. “They brought the police. Couldn’t hardly walk out the door without some police stopping you, asking you questions about your own business.”

  “Before the police came, did you know who they were? Did you ever meet them?”

  “Who are you, askin’ me so many questions?”

  I took out my card and reached it toward her. She pinched it between two fingers as if it might be toxic, studied it before she shook her head. “I never saw nothin’,” she said, slipping the card into her handbag. The death stare again: “I said, you best get to steppin’.”

  I wished her a good day, watched her walk up to a small pink-stucco house. Jack was red in the face again, deeply chagrined and very nervous. Under his breath, he said, “Let’s split.”

  “She didn’t mean anything,” I said. “That’s just her way of looking after the neighborhood.”

  “I saw hatred in her face, like she thought I was the fuzz or something.”

  “The poh-lice,” I said, mimicking the woman’s accent. “No one says fuzz anymore except on ‘Dragnet’ reruns. Jack, honey, you just have to spend more time on the street. Where have you been?”

  His color deepened. “Covering rock bands.”

  “I want to go up and knock on that door, but I don’t have time. like the lady says, we best get to steppin’.”

  On the outside, the Hot-Cha Club on Florence looked like a dive on a street pockmarked by dives. In place of front windows, there were garish cheesecake posters of exaggerated female forms, posed in the distorted hips-back, bosom-up pose of the genre. A sagging
, faded red satin curtain hung in the open door. The owner was obviously vigilant about painting over new graffiti eruptions to keep his place from becoming a gang newspaper. His exterior was a patchwork of shades of brown made by his paint roller.

  I parked in the side lot and got out.

  “What is it you need to do here?” Jack asked.

  “Talk to the owner about a filming date mix-up.”

  He was patting his shirt pocket again, feeling for his cigarettes. “I’ll catch up to you.”

  My thought as I crossed the lot was that Jack should stick to covering rock bands because he just did not seem to have the pit bull instinct needed for investigative reporting. One thing I knew for sure, he would never go knock on a door in a hail of bullets. Hell, he wouldn’t even follow me into a topless bar—a dud as an escort. I was afraid that if he didn’t start doing some footwork, I was going to come off looking like a rock band.

  I walked in alone.

  A banner hanging from the low eaves of the Hot-Cha offered a businessman’s buffet lunch special and lingerie modeling. It was noon and the place was packed with a clientele that looked like construction workers and salesmen. They weren’t a rowdy lot, and seemed, frankly, to be as interested in the all-you-can-eat chicken wings and pizza as they were in the dancers bumping and grinding on the raised circular stage in the middle of the big room.

  The air was blue with smoke and the music was tinny and loud, but, overall, the place wasn’t as sleazy as I had expected it to be. The four dancers, even in their bizarre peekaboo lingerie, were beautiful. And young. With USC in the neighborhood and UCLA just up the freeway, I wondered what sort of scholarship program Sal Ypolito might be running.

  An old relic of a man in a starched dress shirt and white towel apron stopped me at the door.

  “Something I can do for you, sugar?” he asked, looking me over, ducking around to catch a glimpse of my rear.

  “I need to see Sal Ypolito,” I said.

  He turned, aimed his voice at the man setting out fresh pizza on the buffet table, and yelled, “Sal! Lady to see ya.”

  Sal glanced up long enough to say, “We ain’t hirin’.”

  I walked over to him and handed him my card. “I’m Maggie MacGowen. We seem to be having a misunderstanding.”

  “You, maybe. But not me.” He hacked the pizza into a dozen narrow slices with a cleaver. “I understand perfect. I don’t need you guys screwing around in here. Ain’t good for business.”

  Fergie had warned me: Sal was a caricature of himself, a short, round, balding old geek with a heavy Jersey accent and the stub of a wet cigar plugged into the corner of his mouth. Fergie was a cream puff and he had walked all over her, taken advantage of her, made promises to let us film inside his place that he never intended to keep. He cashed our deposit against possible damages, and backed out. I needed to show him that I wasn’t as easy as Fergie.

  I said, “When I get a signature on a deal, I expect it to be respected. You gave my staff permission to film an interview in your establishment before opening, and now I hear you’re trying to renege.”

  “‘Renege?’” he scoffed. “Is that a racial word?”

  “You cashed the check we sent you, Mr. Ypolito. You can talk to me, or you can talk to the network lawyers.”

  “They as pretty as you, sweetcakes?”

  “No. They are not. And they aren’t as reasonable, either.”

  “Eh? Fuck ’em. There’s lotsa places on the avenue just as pho-to-graph-ic as the Hot-Cha. Not as nice, sure, but you can fix them up with all the stuff you do. I been on the studio tour. I know you can fix up any place.”

  “I don’t want any place. I want the Hot-Cha. I’m filming an interview with one of your former dancers, and I want to film it here, just like it says on the agreement you signed.”

  He turned up the cigar corner of his mouth, went off on a tangent as a diversion. “Michelle. She was one good-lookin’ broad. Stacked up to here.” He tapped the bottom of his double chins. “Not much of a dancer, but she brought in the customers. Course, I don’t know why you want to take her picture now. She don’t look so good no more.”

  “I haven’t seen her yet, but looking good isn’t the point.” I surveyed the room and knew exactly where I was going to put Michelle—sitting on the edge of the stage, right next to the stainless poles one of the dancers was making love to, with the rotating pink lights behind her. Maybe we’d even use Sal’s sound track, turned low, in the background.

  “I did her,” Sal said. Then he shrugged. “But who didn’t?”

  Since he was smiling, I asked him, “Do you remember Roy Frady coming in here?”

  “Oh sure.” The cigar twitched. “Came in here. Nice, clean-cut boy. That kind comes in lookin’ for somethin’ they never had before, you know?” He jabbed me with a flash of elbow and winked lewdly. “Somethin’ a little bit different.”

  “Did he come in frequently?”

  “Two, three times a week. I gave the boys in blue a little discount. It don’t hurt business none when they come by. Put everyone on their good behavior, so to speak. Pour a few drinks in an off-duty cop, he don’t mind breaking a few heads for you.”

  “Did Roy do that for you?”

  “Now and then.” He said it dismissively, as if any head breaking Roy might have done was inconsequential. “Lot of the boys came in back then. He was just one of them. I only remember him because of the way he went down.” He paused. “And because the dicks was in here every day asking questions till I almost locked the doors and went home. To Paramus.”

  “Do the police still come in?”

  “Not unless I call nine-one-one. These kids is different nowadays. Buncha’ bodybuilders. They eat more yogurt than pussy.”

  When the little troll winked at me again, I backed up. I said, “So, what about our deal?”

  “Maybe I should talk to your boss.”

  “I am the boss, Mr. Ypolito.”

  “Little thing like you?”

  At five-seven, I was three inches taller than he was. “It’s me or F. Lee Bailey. Take your pick.”

  “What did you want to do again?”

  “Film a conversation with Michelle Tarbett on the stage where she used to work. We have her scheduled at nine o’clock tomorrow morning, before you open for the day. Read the contract,” I said. And added, “Think of the publicity.”

  He turned toward the stage, where two women were simulating sex with each other. “Yeah. Okay. But only because I already spent the check.”

  “Smart decision, Sal.” With a last look around, I left.

  Outside in the smog, I drew in some deep breaths to get the smell of the place out of my lungs.

  Jack was sitting in my car. “Everything go okay?” he asked as I opened my door.

  “Just peachy.” I thought I remembered locking the car. But maybe not. “Where shall I drop you?”

  “I was hoping to tag along for a while,” he said.

  “Right now you can’t come where I’m going,” I said, pulling out onto Florence. “The shoot is shut down for the day, so your best bet is to go over to the studio and talk with Lana Howard, catch up with Guido there. Guido will give you the technical scoop.”

  Had I been in Jack’s place, I would have pissed and moaned until my subject gave in and let me stay attached. But Jack told me where he had parked, down on Eighty-ninth, and I dropped him off with a promise to call.

  I was back on the freeway five minutes later. I had an appointment with the FBI in Westwood to talk about the SLA’s laundry.

  On the freeway north, I returned calls. I got my ex’s answering machine, a good sign because he should have been at the Houston airport waiting for Casey.

  My mother answered in my sister’s Berkeley hospital room.

  “Emily had another grand mal seizure,” Mother said. She sounded composed, but I heard the tension in her voice. “It passed. She’s stable now.”

  “Do you want me to fly up?”

/>   There was a pause before she said, “No. Your uncle Max is driving in tonight from the desert. If you came, too, it would alarm your father.”

  “I’ll try to get up over the weekend,” I said.

  “Really, there’s no need. Better you spend the time with Mike. Emily won’t know you’re here.” She said that last sentence with a catch in her voice. Even after two years, the truth about Emily was incomprehensible.

  Before she took a 9-mm round through her right temporal lobe in a Los Angeles alley, my sister Emily was a scrapper: brilliant, six feet tall, a powerhouse. Now, after two years in a coma, she looked like a poster child for the starving in Somalia, a rack of flesh and bone curled into a fetal position. When her eyes occasionally opened, they opened into a vacant house.

  Ever since the shooting, Emily had managed to take care of the crucial functions all by herself: to breathe, to keep her heart beating. Then, a month ago, out of nowhere, she started having seizures. No one could tell us where they came from or what they portended. Or what legal provisions we should be talking about. And how we should begin to let her go.

  Mother and I talked about Casey for a few minutes. By the time we said good-bye, she sounded stronger and I felt better—the telephonic equivalent of sitting on Mom’s lap.

  I called Scotty’s number in Houston again and told the machine I needed to talk to Casey right away. It was true; I needed to talk to Casey.

  At the federal building, I passed through the metal detector without setting off anything, and managed to find my way through the FBI maze to the office of Agent Chuck Kellen-berger, the resident expert on the SLA.

  Kellenberger was in his fifties, gray hair, gray suit, gray office walls, a belly that said desk jockey. He had the reserve of a man whose job is finding information, not giving it out. Mike Flint had pulled some strings to get me this far, but it was clear that, on my own, this interview would be a difficult one.